Victory
by TotoroBird
Summary: After Rudy saves her book from the river, Liesel finally gives in. A collection of one-shots about their victories in life, jumping around their timeline a bit. Rated M for some swearing, some smut and just life in general.
1. Victory

A/N: So yeah, I wanted to do a fanfic where the laws of canon didn't exist and Rudy finally gets his kiss. Because truthfully, he should have got it for rescuing her book from the river and we all know it.

I honestly don't know why anyone would think I owned the Book Thief, but I'll say it a hundred times and more if it means no one sues me.

...Please don't sue me.

* * *

***A Small Observation From Rudy Steiner***

**It was like a game of hide and seek.  
**

**I personally thought it was more like a treasure hunt.**

**But what do I know?**

**I'm not the one plunging into the Amper river in the middle of December.**

It was certainly a lot like a treasure hunt.

Searching, scouring, begging the darkness to reveal the grand prize before a darker force of nature stole it from under him. And it was most definitely a grand prize for Rudy Steiner, if he could only find it. Yes. He would find it. It would be a final victory after many failures. He would win.

His gracefully distorted limbs stung in the frosty cold, his numb fingers wildly grasping at anything he could reach. He flailed awkwardly in the black, marble oblivion, an odd mix of a fish in air and a bird in water. His skin ached desperately for warmth; his eyelids were heavy with the weight of the river piled on top of him. It felt like he was wrapped in Winter, a gown of snow and ice.

Yet he continued, determinedly stifling his frozen lungs as he tried to discern the rectangular mound of soggy cardboard and paper from the rest of his blurry blue vision. Each movement was painfully slow, beautiful and soft and deadly, bitten with each dragging, raw second. His ears were ringing like an alarm bell, tearing the wonderful, suffocating silence in half with the crisp clanging of his heartbeat.

He's an odd boy, that one. A brave one, maybe; a stupid one, absolutely. It was hard to tell which factor drove the other, for they were all but indistinguishable whenever Rudy came into question. Not that it mattered most of the time. But then, there were those times - including this one - where he would get himself into impossible situations and even I have to wonder what the hell was going through his head. Bravery? Maybe. Stupidity? Absolutely.

He would have to go back up. His throat thirsted for oxygen. The cold was surely going to draw him to an early, watery grave. Anyone else in the world would have gone back up. Maybe even given up. This was not a case for giving up, however. He needed this.

She needed this.

He could still see it. What had driven him to this point. Who had driven him to this point.

It was the pure devastated defeat that clouded her face as she watched the book tumble over and over in the air, crack the glass surface of the water, and submerge into the deep, black oblivion. Nothing else had really registered at that point, just the overwhelming urge to retrieve that book. Retrieve some form of victory over life, who, up to this point, seemed to be having a great time screwing him over.

True story.

*** A Small Fact That Rudy Would Deny *  
**

**On some level, however small and disagreeable that level was to him,  
**

**he wanted to retrieve the smile to the Book Thief's face,  
**

**and the sense of achievement that came with causing it.  
**

**That was victory he truly longed for.**

His pounding blood was burning him up from the inside; the water stung his eyes. Still, he stayed, reaching out for whatever he could find. His limbs were freezing by the second and his head spun wildly.

He had to find it.

For her. For the Book Thief.

Such an odd boy. But then, I suppose humans are very odd creatures. Especially when it comes to love.

Finally, his fingers enclosed around a hard, rectangular object, drifting dreamily through the water. He clutched it to his chest like it was his heartbeat and kicked upward. His clothes pulled him down, yet his eyes made out blanched white sunlight, streaming through layers of December water. His lungs were about to burst as he shattered the water's surface, grasping the book with one hand above his yellow head.

If I had the ability to cheer, I would have done so. Instantly. But I don't think anyone thought about giving me the ability to cheer when I was hired. It's not the type of job that entails joy of any kind. Never stopped me though.

Oxygen filled him once again as he gasped and spat out river from his mouth. He looked around to see Liesel stood by the water's edge, a look of elated surprise falling over her panicked features as she saw him and the book resurface.

*** Another Small Fact *  
**

**Despite what Rudy thought, it wasn't the salvaged book  
**

**that brought relief to her face.**

Rudy began making his way back to the shore, staggering through the water one handed, a triumphant grin stuck to the corners of his mouth. He heard a crash, and found Liesel stumbling out to meet him, obviously trying to stifle the shivering that had suddenly grappled her small body. They met half way, waist deep in the dark, murky liquid ice, stolen air heaving through their slowly melting lungs.

'Hey.' He grinned breathlessly down at her.

For a moment, Liesel seemed incapable of speech. Then she choked out a small, disbelieving, 'Hey.'

'So, thought you'd join me? Such a lovely day,' he said, gazing casually out at the shimmering, glassy surface of the water as dully glinting crystal beads ran races down his skin.

'Yes, it certainly is pleasant,' she conceded, shivering.

He held out the book, now heavy with river and grime. Her fingers trembled - with either cold or emotion I couldn't really tell, but I think we can take an educated guess - as they folded around the crusty, wet mound and clutched it protectively to her chest. She looked up at him with a strange wide-eyed, parted-lips expression. I've seen that expression before. Oh yes I have.

It's the face of a revelation. The discovery of something new. Or something that had been very well hidden for a long, long time. Buried underneath the thick layers of basements and Jewish fist fighters and accordions, so much so that it could barely breathe, barely be found.

But now it was there. Revealing itself for what seemed for the first time. The secret even Liesel didn't know, slicing through her as acutely as the cold that crept up her skin like vines.

Yet there was fear in her eyes: a helpless vulnerability piercing the brown droplets that reflected him, and only him. She was afraid of this new feeling. She was afraid of him. With the sudden transparency of her soul, she felt exposed and unsure of what any of it meant. It was foreign and dangerous, and a sure ticket to downfall. No, it needed to be suppressed. Like everything else.

Humans can be really quite endearing sometimes.

Rudy watched her expectantly. I'm not entirely sure what he was waiting for - aside from the obvious choice of a kiss, but even he wasn't hopeful for that. Maybe just a response.

'Oi saumensch,' he waved a dripping hand in front of her face. 'I'm sort of freezing here. Now if you could just give me my kiss, I'll be on my way.'

'You wish, saukerl.'

It amazes me that even in the wake of a life altering realization, she still has enough time for a childish retort.

'Come on,' she said, taking a step back and trying to keep the tremor out of her voice, 'We really are going to freeze to death if we stay here.' She turned her back on him and headed for the shore, her paces dripping heavily with sudden self-awareness.

It took Liesel exactly six steps and a half to realise that her best friend was not actually following her; she turned in confusion and mild irritation to see Rudy stood exactly where he had been for the past five minutes. Half-submerged in reflected sky, he looked expectantly at her. His perfect German eyes balanced neatly between foolish hope and something that cut far deeper into the chiselled, icy blue. Sadness. Another emotion I know all too well.

'What the hell are you doing, dummkopf? You're going to lose your toes at this rate!' she called to him.

'I wasn't joking.' His voice slipped across the smooth surface of the water, flat and defeated as the concrete sky above them.

Liesel didn't want to play this game. He was meddling with her emotions, twisting them and twirling them round his fingers. Was it on purpose or not? She had no way of telling. But whatever happened, it could only hurt in the end. There was no way she could afford the cripplingly high price of this revelation.

'Niether was I.'

Such a cold sound. Colder than the frost that crept along the tiny hairs on her arms. If temperature affected me, I could have felt the icy words slice through my chest like it did to the boy. Hurt grappled his face, eating at his eyes, yet he kept his face a solid as stone.

***The Truth About Rudy Steiner***

**He was a brave boy.**

**Braver than most.**

**But I have never seen him braver**

**than this moment of betrayal and heartbreak.**

'What do I have to do for you, Liesel?'

There it was. The question that had stuck, discarded and forgotten but still overwhelmingly present, in his throat since the very beginning, built up from the dusty remains of childhood adoration. As his love for her grew, so did the questions, until they fogged his brain and leaked out his lips when he knew she was nowhere around. The words he asked the darkness when sleep was a faraway prospect that clawed away from him.

He wasn't even sure if he wanted an answer. He needed one, that was for certain. But did he necessarily want one? Now that's a different question entirely.

And so there he stood. Gazing hopefully at the Book Thief - his Book Thief - for some kind of reassurance, however paper thin, however transparent. Because there was nothing else.

Liesel looked at him in surprise, her earthy brown eyes wide. It was the rare use of her actual name rather than petty insults of endearment that hit hard. For a moment, she was rendered speechless, unable to find any words to compensate such a bittersweet question. Her fingers clenched around the thick, damp cover of her beloved book, the price of her best friend.

'I-' she began, then stopped abruptly. It was one of those rare points in her papery life that she was lost for words. After another deep breath, she began again. 'I don't know what you mean.'

'Don't play dumb with me,' he spat out, his voice stinging the cold, winter air.

'Rudy, I don't know. Now just come out of the water, before you catch pneumonia or something,' she said impatiently.

'Would you care?' he asked. 'Would you really care?' He waded further out into the water, a look of stubborn, determined malice on his face. His eyebrows were raised defiantly, his arms out in the air beside him like a crucifix.

'Rudy,' she hissed. Her voice was edged with a sharp, ringing warning tone. 'Of course I care about you.'

'Oh yeah?' he bellowed. 'Well then why don't you prove it.'

Liesel glared at him. Her grip on the book was loosening.

'Come on, Book Thief.' She could here the taunting in his voice, the raw, aching hurt underneath. Or maybe that was just me. 'What are you afraid of? Just prove it!'

The book fell from her grasp onto the soft, crunchy earth beside her feet. The water splashing noisily around her rapidly flooding shoes barely registered as she marched straight towards the boy with lemon hair.

'You think I don't care?' she yelled, stumbling as fast as she could through the strong, muscly arms of the river, 'Do you? You think I don't care? Well I do! I love you, you hear me? I goddamn love you, saukerl!'

Rudy could barely reply, barely even smile before her lips swiftly met with his, crushing his grin with her own. He staggered a little, nearly losing his balance in the water, but her determined grip on him would not allow him to do so. His lips tasted like river, and ice, and stolen penny sweets. He tasted like Rudy Steiner, simply Rudy Steiner, her wonderful, wonderful best friend.

Her arms wove around his neck, locked him there; she wouldn't release him until he got the point, no matter how long it took. One arm wrapped round her waist and pulled her close to him, the other tangled longingly in her almost-German hair, pulling her closer still. Close was never enough for his Book Thief. The cold seemed to evaporate around them as Rudy received the victory he truly longed for.

Liesel poured everything into that kiss. All the hidden love and passion burning underneath the stolen books, and the dusty taste of library that she relished so much. This kiss was her revelation. He was her revelation. Of course she loved him. That stupid boy with his yellow hair and idiot Hitler Youth grin. There was never any doubt.

Rudy was never one for words. It was difficult for him to acutely describe the wild, frozen drumming of his heartbeat as he felt Liesel press up against him; the soft texture of her messy hair in his damp, muddy hand. Yet it didn't stop him almost lifting her into the air in elation and pure, unrestrained euphoria.

She could taste his smile, his triumph on her lips. It tasted so sweet, such a delicious prize, a wonderful gift from one thief to another. In some sickly, tender twist of metaphorical beauty, they had managed to steal each other's hearts somehow, though it is biologically impossible and - if I may say so - a little cliché.

Liesel pulled away softly, yet Rudy held her in place, unwilling to release her quite yet. They attempted (and failed) to steady their breathing, the silent, joyful rasping of their desperate lungs, craving the oxygen they stole from each other.

'Is that proof enough, arsehole?' she grinned up at him, her hands still resting on the back of his neck.

'Nope,' he shook his head in mock disappointment. 'Not quite.'

'What do I have to do for you?' she sighed in exasperation, mimicking his words.

'I don't know,' he said thoughtfully, kissing her on the nose and earning a laugh from her. 'What do you propose?'

'Well,' she replied levelly, 'For starters, we should get out of this bloody water before I pass out from cold.'

'Fair point.'

Clutching his hand with numb fingers, Liesel led him towards the shore, the frost clinging to their lungs and rib cages like cement. They staggered onto the grass, clothed in river, nearly tumbling over onto their grubby knees. Rudy caught her to him, pulling her close again, and kissing her lips once again.

'What's the probability of my clothes drying before Rosa finds out?' she asked contemplatively.

'Pretty slim, saumensch.'

'Well as long as we don't freeze to death, do you fancy a walk?'

'Sounds good to me.'

Liesel knelt down and picked up the sodden lump from the ground and they headed off towards the bridge, fingers clumsily entwined.

***A Small Observation From Myself***

**Truthfully, it was more like a treasure hunt.**

**By no means was the book ever the prize.**

* * *

A/N: Thank you for reading. I'm sorry if I made that too fluffy; I know it may not be completely in character but these two are just too damn adorable.

I may - MAY - continue it. It depends really on feedback and whether I have any inspiration over the next few days. I'll really try to continue it if that's what people want but I can't promise anything.

I hope you enjoyed and please leave a review! It really makes my day.


	2. Home

**A/N: Hey guys. I originally just planned this as a one-shot, but people really want another chapter, so BAM! Here you go.**

**'It's basically going to be key points in their relationship (I know it's been done to death but I really have no clue how else to go about it - great writer aren't I?) but mostly linking to one theme of victory and loss. Anyway, thanks for sticking with me this long. I hope it lives up to your expectations.**

* * *

So here we are again. On another treasure hunt. But one of an entirely different kind.

***The Inconvenient Truth***

**Himmel wasn't Himmel anymore.**

**Sometimes I really hate the truth.**

I watched as Liesel sat on the dusty, cracked ground in a wide pool of harsh, grey sunlight. Scraps of dissolved concrete floated through the air like snowflakes, drifting across her eyelids and resting in the folds of her clothes. There was Himmel Street all over her, eating at her bitterly heavy lungs and creeping into her ashen blonde hair. She let it. She wanted to be smothered with home. She wanted to breathe it in until it was all that existed.

Her fingers crawled through the mountainous piles of crumbling brick and shattered glass. She ignored the scraping bites on her hands from the rough, sharp edges - unidentifiable in their present state. What could have been a shard of grimy window could have equally been a jagged corner of wall. Not that it mattered. Nor did it matter that there was a small stream of hot blood dribbling from her palms to her fingernails. Nothing mattered.

It was hard to determine what exactly she was looking for, and why she was here in the first place. Only she seemed to know why she was swimming through rubble. But then, that's how it was. The days since the sky was set on fire had dragged into a long, mournful blur, as if the world had given up on itself. Nothing seemed to function correctly anymore. Not even Liesel.

It was difficult to discern one date from another, and the time in between was another hour of clutching at the warm oblivion of sleep and watching her mind fall into decay while awake. Dreams and reality merged into each other like watercolours, powered by her salty tears. Her heart was aching. Every. Goddamn. Day.

Sometimes she would find herself wandering, just wandering, along the cold, concrete streets, the murmuring and laughing of the passers by ringing in her unsteady mind. Her feet would lead her to the oddest of places - sometimes to the cupboard under the stairs in 18 Grande Strasse, where she would curl up among the jutting chimneys of brooms and shelving; and sometimes as far as the the very edge of Molching. Then her feet would bring her wandering right back, maybe at the dawn of another chipped, painted pink morning, to an unfamiliar bed.

It had been exactly - and ironically - thirty three days since Liesel had last seen Rudy. After a tearful reunion with his father at the funeral, he had left with him, at the same time hiding away into nothingness, beyond her line of sight. Maybe he had gone away. Far away from where the line between life and death was distorted and unpredictable. She really wouldn't have been surprised.

It had also been thirty three days since Liesel had last spoken. Whether it was her stubborn disposition towards opening up about her emotions, or whether the shock had genuinely stripped her of all she was, no words were born from her tongue and tossed into the world to be eaten up.

All words had been stolen from her lips. Every golden syllable, every delicious sound drawn from her throat with needle sharp accuracy. Everything else had melted away. These days, the Book Thief was silent.

Truthfully, that prospect was better than facing the other, more devastating reality.

***A Small, Sad Fact***

**Four things were missing from Liesel's shattered life:**

**1x Max Vandeburg**

**1x Ilsa Hermann's little black book**

**1x Mama **

**1x Papa **

Oh Papa...

Dusty tears tumbled from under her eyelids, leaving racetracks in the Himmel Street dirt plastering her face. Yet her hands continued to fumble mindlessly, mercilessly for whatever could ease the determination rising in her chest. Her forearms were scratched and coated with a fine layer of ash, suffocating her pale skin with grey from the plane's ribcage.

I noticed that Liesel wore no shoes. Ironically, that was the first thing I noticed when Heaven was destroyed. Her feet were bare and cracked like glass, digging into the warm, gritty road beneath her. It was a depressing sight, seeing such a delicate mess of pale limbs - so liable to break - and heavy brown eyes crushed against a backdrop of solid, grey tarmac.

Liesel could vaguely hear the buzzing of morning gossip like the faraway murmur of insects. A sea of indistinguishable noise seeping into her consciousness as she dug deeper and deeper into the ruins.

But there was another noise. A familiar noise. One that stood on it's own from the raging ocean behind her. Oh, how she loved that sound; held it close to her heartbeat in such a corrupted world, when nothing else existed. It called her name.

'Liesel!'

She could hear him. Her wonderful next door neighbour. The boy she gave into only a year ago. It had been some stupid dare, or something along those lines. He had threatened to freeze to death, so the only course of action seemed pretty obvious. That day, her saukerl got his kiss. No regrets there.

But no. No more distractions. She needed to find it. It had to be somewhere nearby.

'Liesel? Are you there?' The voice was closer. She wanted to call back, escape the ugly little world of solitude she had trapped herself in. But the ash in her lungs and the angry red motivation beating into her skull prevented her. She couldn't remember how to speak.

Max would be disappointed. The Word Shaker? Forgotten how to speak? That would be the day.

But that day had come. There were no more words.

Except maybe one.

'Rudy.'

It fell defeatedly from her lips, as insubstantial and light as a raindrop, scattering as it hit the ground. Her throat ached with disuse and the strained effort of producing that small, insignificant, two-syllabled word. But it was her word. Of course it was hers.

'Liesel!' The voice seemed to have located her and was getting nearer. She could hear the scuffling footsteps of Jesse Owens running. He was getting closer. She could just turn around and see his familiar lemon hair and his idiot face, so sorely missed in its gaping absence. Her best friend had come back.

Yet she continued to scrabble through the decomposing bones of her old house. She had to find it. Like he had found it.

He had searched through ice. She would search through fire.

There was a spray of dirt as he skidded to a halt (surprise, surprise) and there he stood before her, his eyes wide with concern, and - more prominently - confusion. His hands had unconsciously curled into fists

***Something No One Knew***

**Rudy had hoped he could go to his grave without returning to Himmel.**

**I don't blame him.**

'Hey,' Rudy said softly.

That word. She knew it well. The first word he said when he re-emerged from the great, icy oblivion of the Amper River, clutching it in his trembling hands.

Liesel was silent. She contemplated exercising her vocal chords, old and dusty with endless hours of misuse. But she had nothing to say. With the exception of...

'Hey.'

Rudy bit down on a nostalgic smile - one of the best, most painful kind - and, drawing reassurance from this short, dead word, knelt down beside her. Her roaming fingers froze where they were, pausing on a stiff, snapped paintbrush as she stared straight ahead. I wondered briefly if she knew who this object belonged to but I decided not to question this bitterly ironic occurrence.

It was on the edge of his tongue, barely hidden behind his teeth. A question. A question she could not possibly have a logical answer to. She could feel it tasting the air as if contemplating its escape. She knew long before it came.

'Why are you here?' he asked quietly.

There it is.

Liesel honestly wanted to give him an answer. She wanted to smile, and tell him it was there was no reason. No reason at all. She wanted to reach over and kiss him, and for him to kiss her back, because everything's alright. Isn't it? Isn't it.

No it isn't. It will never be alright.

'I-' She gulped and began again. 'I don't know.'

'Liesel,' he said. She looked up at him, and saw deep distress in buried deep under the surface of his perfect German eyes. 'Don't bullshit me. I'm not an idiot. Just tell me what's wrong.'

Such a large, consequential proposition for such a small, insignificant young girl. The way of the world I suppose.

Liesel had the urge to argue, to sting the air with her burning, recycled words. But it would hurt her more than the boy.

'Take an educated guess.'

'Liesel,' he warned, 'I didn't come back here for a bunch of cryptic clues. What's wrong?'

'Everything,' she said flatly. 'Everything.'

'Oh,' he said, scratching his head sheepishly, 'I guess I am an idiot for not figuring that out.'

'Just a little bit.'

They fell into another silence, but the disposition was considerably warmer. Rudy always seemed on the verge of letting out another question, seemingly deciding against it each time.

Liesel watched him thoughtfully. He had grown quite a bit since the river incident: he was certainly taller now, but hadn't quite started to broaden out, like he couldn't quite catch up with himself. His dearly familiar face was mostly the same, except for one majorly apparent factor: me. Meeting me and my work can change the most innocent, the most fragile young souls into monsters. Rudy now had a cold, despairing wariness chipping away at his eyes. He knew that his childish concept of consistency and eternity had been shattered, and now he never wanted to make the same mistake again. It hurt too much.

'By everything, what exactly do you mean?' he asked cautiously.

'Nothing. By definition, nothing. Everything is dead.'

They were ugly words. Disgusting, putrid, absolutely truthful words. And she spat them out with anger and grief, her voice wavering with threatening sobs. They tumbled onto the pale grey ground, blanched with disinfectant sunlight.

This time, it was Rudy that was silent. She could hear his uneven breathing as he tried to steady the tears that were grappling his face.

'I should have died,' she muttered, digging her fingernails into the splintered wood of the paintbrush, 'I should have died...'

No.

Liesel let out a heartbroken wail and collapsed onto the pavement, her hands slumping away from what was once her home, her beloved home, where her Mama and Papa once lived and breathed. They were so close, yet further away than she could reach. She wanted to reach for them, hold their hands one more time, kiss them goodbye, drink champagne with her Papa, hug her Mama, beautiful, beautiful Mama.

But they were gone. Far, far away. It killed her.

Rudy wrapped his arms around her trembling form, pulling her head up into his neck so that she was curled into him. His throat was immediately smattered with her tears, mingling with his own which were now flowing smoothly and soundlessly down his face. She looked up at him, her brown eyes wide, with pure, unrestrained sadness, simply sadness. He thought she looked beautiful.

'It hurts, Rudy,' she whispered, closing her eyes. 'Why won't it stop?'

'I know it hurts, I know,' he murmured, pressing his lips to her forehead and rocking her gently.

'I should have died. Why couldn't I have died?' She was crying now. Her sobs were coming in hard and fast, biting her aching lungs as her small body involuntarily convulsed. Rudy clung to her, forever rocking her like a child. It was oddly comforting.

'Just let it end,' she wept. 'Please just let it end.'

These words cut dangerously close to where my bones would be, if I indeed had any. It was because they were directed at me. She was not stating her wishes. She was requesting it.

Any merciful person would give in to it. But I suppose you could say I'm a bit of a coward when it comes to these matters. Besides, I couldn't possibly have done such a thing to the very distressed Rudy Steiner.

'Stop it,' he said, and I heard the childish tremor in his voice, 'You're not going to die.'

'Please,' she begged. 'Let it end.'

'Liesel, stop it,' he cried, 'You give up like this, you can't...'

'I can't do it, Rudy. It's too much,' she whined, clutching his hand.

'You can,' he choked out. 'You will.'

He cupped her face, carefully rubbing away her tears with his thumb, but more appearing out of nowhere like rain. Her face was coated in dust and grime, her crying having cut racetracks through it. She looked so desperate, so very tired, balancing on the edge of sleepy defeat and crippling insanity.

He wanted to tell her about the life she'd have. He wanted to tell her about the books he'd buy for her once he had the money; the library they'd build together and fill up with her words. Her beautiful brown eyes in the face of their laughing, yellow haired child. The smile on her lips when she saw her book in the local store. He wanted to tell her everything. But the words were dried up in his throat, suffocating as the concrete sky. So he did something else.

Rudy leant down and kissed her so very tenderly on her cheek. Her heaving, ragged breathing slowed and evened out. Her clenched fists loosened, the dried blood plastered to her fingers cracking as they crept up to cradle his dear, dear face. He kissed her eyelids, then her nose, and then, finally, her craving mouth. On broken Himmel, two youths were entwined.

***An Observation***

**That kid really knows how to get into the Book Thief's head.**

They broke apart, gazing at each other softly. Liesel's lungs suddenly swelled with glorious, earthy words as they grew from her veins and grappled her fluttering heart, like a strong note drawn from an accordion's lips. She felt like she was going to burst with the sheer, daunting height of adoration that flooded her thoughts. She wasn't happy as such. That would come later. But she knew she was loved. It was good enough for her.

'I'm sorry,' she murmured, wiping her eyes. 'I was being an idiot.'

'Just a little bit.'

She let out a small, shaky laugh and reached up to kiss him once again. He smiled into her ashen mouth, holding her close. They released each other eventually, and pushed themselves to their feet. Feathery flakes of smoky brick had settled in their hair, blanching them grey, swirling in the air. It was a harsh kind of beauty, the soft, sweet decaying kind that not many have the painful privilege to witness. It tasted like metallic industrialism and home.

'Let's get out of here,' Rudy muttered, looking around at the silence.

Liesel nodded, looking down at the tear-stained, blood-stained carcass of her former house. Her eyes never left it as Rudy led her away, through the stony-faced streets towards the Amper River. None of of them were as beautiful as Himmel. None even came close. They imprinted its dust on the roads with every footstep.

As the familiar sound of rushing water met with their blunted senses, Rudy looked down at her hand and yelped.

'Jesus, Mary and Joseph! What the hell have you done to your hand?' he exclaimed, examining it more closely.

'The rubble did that,' she explained, glancing at it dismissively.

'Why?' He looked at her incredulously, then back at her bleeding fingers.

'I was looking for something,' she replied levelly.

She could feel his inquisitive gaze boring into her, and knew, before all else, the would be another question stinging the air. Because Rudy never really knew when to shut up.

'What were you looking for?' he asked, once curiosity seemed to overwhelm him. It does that a lot.

'The Whistler,' she said. His confused expression prompted an explanation. She sighed, and continued.

'I don't know exactly. This morning, I just woke up with the urge to find it - my head has been sort of screwed up recently. It felt like I needed to, like it was almost like a betrayal to you if I didn't. How you had risked you life for it and I couldn't exactly repay you-' Rudy opened his mouth to interrupt but was swiftly silenced with a hard look from her, '-I wanted to keep your victory alive, in a way. I didn't want your efforts to go to waste.'

She shook her head and sighed again. 'Fat lot of good it did. I end up having a bloody breakdown and I don't even find it.'

Rudy was enveloped in contemplative silence for several seconds. Then, 'Thank you.'

'For what?' she asked in surprise.

'For you,' he said seriously, then grinned. I wondered what exactly had possessed him to say such a stupid line, then I remembered that he was completely under that girl's influence and probably wouldn't be leaving for several years to come. Humans really make my day sometimes.

Her eyebrows shot up. Apparently, I wasn't the only one. 'God, Rudy. Why did you have to make it so corny?' she laughed.

'Because you love me and you know it' he informed her, smirking.

Suddenly, she reached out for his arm and tugged him into a fierce hug. He froze momentarily in surprise, then hesitantly wrapped his arms around her waist. She smelt of home.

'I do,' she murmured into his shoulder.

Then, just as swiftly, she released him and ran, almost as fast as Rudy, across the bridge and back to 18 Grande Strasse. She didn't stop until she was upstairs in her new bedroom, clutching her aching ribs.

Then, she let herself weep.

Exactly two and a half days later, she found something hidden under a bush beside the front step. It was rectangular, old and crusted over with dried precipitation and ash. She could just make out the title on the front.

'Goddamn...' she whispered, a smile growing at the corners of her lips.

The Whistler.

***Something Liesel Now Knew***

******Rudy had hoped he could go to his grave without returning to Himmel.**

******But he did.**

******Twice.**

* * *

******A/N: Sorry for the long wait. It took me such a friggin long time - and when I say long, I mean Season 4 of Sherlock came back before I finished this. I think it may have been the most painful fanfic I've ever had to write, because I got stuck every other sentence and I had no idea where it was going. So thank God, it's done.**

******Expect more chapters, because they're on their way. Just don't expect them in chronological order because it's going to jump around their timeline a bit.**

******Thank you for your continued support. You all make my day so much brighter.**


	3. Pain

**A/N: Hey guys, it's me again. Sorry it's been so long, I've been away for a week in a place with no wifi. Thank you for your reviews (and patience). Like I said, it really makes me happy and gives me a valid reason to write. So thanks again.**

**This chapter has jumped ahead several years and has less LieselxRudy fluff in, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.**

* * *

Pain.

Hot, white, intense pain.

Featuring an odd and slightly disturbing mixture of pleading denial from her own body and the forceful, barging crusade of the mysterious little creature between her thighs. It was like nothing Liesel had ever quite experienced, and truthfully, hoped not to experience again.

***In a Blank, White Room***

**The Book Thief was giving birth.**

Her fingers were tightly knotted in institutional, disinfectant sheets, _Munich Hospital _stamped in grim, boxy letters at the head. A thousand hands seemed to be gripping her legs all at once and shoving them up to her chest, a indistinguishable murmur of paper thin reassurance and buzzing encouragements chewing at her ears and causing a dull, blunted pain in her forehead.

Tight, crystal beads of sweat dripped down her face, dragging across her skin like the neat, little click of the seconds passing on the clock. Her insides were collapsing in on themselves with strain. She groaned as another wild, tender wave gripped her abdomen, both crushing her and holding her together at the same time with remarkable power, then collapsed back onto the synthetic polyester pillow. Each gulp of oxygen was a stab in her lungs, acutely centred in her heaving chest with the accuracy of a icy, sharp needle.

Liesel had suffered through all kinds of ordeals. Through bombs from a plane's ribcage, through funeral after funeral, through graveyard after graveyard. She had been beaten and corrupted and buried in dust. From Himmel to Hölle in only the first few years of her life. But this...this was like nothing Liesel knew.

She had no idea where the _fuck_ that saukerl was, nor why he was absent. Last thing she had heard through the thick, vague ringing in her ears was Rudy calling to her as he ran out the room, saying something about 'get Max'. At this current moment, those words made literally no sense to her and she honestly didn't give a flying shit what a 'Max' was.

How the hell Rudy had convinced her this was a good idea was beyond her. Let's have a child, he said. It will be _fun_, he said. Of course _he_ had fun. His bit was over and done with at the very beginning and _she _had to suffer the consequences. If he so much even came near her after this, she would personally castrate him. Idiot.

That woman is truly charming when in labour. Have fun Rudy.

Several hours had already passed, each being slowly and languorously eaten, almost mockingly, then spat right back out at her, ready for her to endure yet another while longer. Time always seemed to taunt her, flaunting the future at her then pulling it from under her feet upon reaching it. Time kept moving the goalpost. The future never came. There was just the present, and the excruciating ache between her legs that flooded every jerking second she resided in.

Her fingernails had scraped from the bedsheets to her thighs, gripping the soft, slick skin and leaving little crescent moons in the flesh. Damp curls of yellow hair were clinging to her forehead, dripping with perspiration. Another groan tore from her lips, and she curled inward, biting down hard on her kneecap for something to wrench her mind away from the pain.

I watched the scene unfurl in twisted curiosity. Reproduction and birth are one of the more grotesquely fascinating processes of life; it's an intense, passionate and oddly beautiful encounter with the laws of nature and evolution that ultimately culminates in another person living and breathing. Another person for me to pick up one day.

Generally, I am a stranger to this area of existence; I deal with the other end of the wonderfully colourful spectrum. But sometimes, under terribly unfortunate circumstances, birth and death aren't as far apart as people would hope. I'm careful with young souls; I carry them in my arms.

***On These Very Sad Occasions***

**It's always the colour white.**

**I don't like that colour.**

Surely it should be over by now? Why wasn't it ending? The waves were growing in frequency, racking her body with hot, burning cramps at her core. They spread through her veins, reaching to the very ends of her being, beating angrily into her head like a tonne of bricks.

It is odd, when you think about it. Sat on high at the top of every human hierarchy, on a golden throne of words and soldiers - a deadly combination - is a man. Always, always a man. And yet, it is the women that endure such hardships that could potentially eat away at them until there was nothing left.

How exactly was it that the male gender clawed its way to the top? Surely females are the stronger race? Especially while witnessing one of said female gender trying to force a child out of her body. Just something I wonder about.

***An Unnecessary Observation***

**Oddly enough, most creatures in nature have worked this out.**

**Only humans haven't.**

**Surprise, surprise.**

The crescent moons were drawing tiny droplets of blood, clumping around the pretty indentations like rose petals. They smiled benignly up at her, ten curving little grins littered across her pale skin, and she found herself hating them, and hating her body, and hoping to Christ that this would end, and the goddamn pain would stop.

The woman between her legs was yelling something about 'it's coming'. It's coming, it's coming, it's coming. Such wonderful, wonderful words. They drifted through her thoughts like a flurry of snow, soothing the hot ache licking at the corners of her throbbing mind. The air tasted of them, delicious and bittersweet. It's coming. Finally.

Suddenly, her abdomen was crushed once again, more intensely, more acutely, directing the pain at her centre as delicately as a sledgehammer. The waves turned to storm, a hurricane in her belly spirally wildly downward. A hoarse scream released from her suffocated throat, ripping the thick, heavy air into pieces like scraps of sky. Her insides clenched, tightening into dense knots. It hurt so very much.

There was a peculiar, slippery sensation beneath her, and then...nothing. Just nothing. Everything stopped. Her head fell back against the pillow, her breathing steadying as the gripping pain slowly subsided and slid away from her bones, to be replaced by a dull, blunt soreness between her thighs. Relief lapped at her skin, the sweat drying on the soft, tired flesh.

All she could hear was the indistinguishable murmur of nurses rummaging about around her, cooing little snippets of praise to her and all her hard work, as if she had just won an award for rescuing several children from a burning building.

But there was another sound. Something that tugged at her veins ands made her feeble heart flutter. A weak, whining little cry.

Her eyes cracked open, searching in curiosity for the source of the sound. It seemed to be hidden among white-clad bodies and buzzing flurries of movement. She eyes ached for it, empty of it. One of the mess of white broke away with a solemn smile, carrying a small bundle.

'Your son, Mrs. Steiner.'

The bundle was carefully laid on her chest. Her hands tentatively crept up to meet the new arrival, cradling it as she looked at it for the first time.

I stepped closer in curiosity, peering at the face of another I would doubtless come to face one day.

Her heart swelled up like accordion bellows as she took in the face of her own baby: his ugly little scrunched up face, twisted into a sleepy cry, and she knew she had never seen anything so truly, unbearably beautiful. So perfect. His small, impossibly soft limbs stretched and curled, his tiny fingers tracing her face, plastered with blood and grime from her womb. She kissed each little fingerprint as they crossed her chin, a watery smile spreading like wings on her face.

It was a mystery to her, how she - a thief, an orphan, a corrupted woman - could have possibly created such a pure, beautiful young creature. He was her flesh and blood, made from her flesh and blood. How could she have made him? He was too innocent, too flawless: from his soft, sparsely yellow-crested head to the tips of his minute toes.

His small, teardrop eyes slid open a little, just enough to take in this odd, beaming creature above him. He contemplated her in mild curiosity. Liesel could only just make out the rusty brown pools at the centre of his eyes, peeking up at her beneath his heavy pink eyelids. She was struck with how much his eyes resembled the pair she often caught sight of reflected in her mirror each day.

A powerfully strong new emotion grappled her heart, weaving between her ribs and filling her lungs with words - most of which were synonims for the same term - as she held him close, cradled his soft, sweet head against her neck. Everything else melted away. No one else mattered. It was just Liesel and her son, her beautiful child.

He was her finest, most wonderful moment, swallowed by time, to continue for the rest of her life.

'What did I miss?' Rudy ran into the room, breathing heavily and clutching his side.

'About time you turned up,' she said. 'Where did you go?'

'I told you. I went to get Max.'

'Oh.' The concept made considerably more sense now that her body wasn't trying to explode. 'Uh, thanks.'

Rudy seemed to have made eye contact with the young infant, wrapped up protectively - and a little possessively - in her arms, who at that current moment (much like his parents would have done, I might add) was staring back, almost defiantly.

He was their son, alright.

Rudy walked forward slowly and stood limply beside the bed, his blue eyes an odd but rather endearing combination of curiosity and tenderness. 'Is this-' he gulped and began again, 'Is this our baby?'

'No, I stole him,' she replied solemnly.

'Him?' Rudy beamed up at her, 'We've had a boy?'

His face was so joyful, balancing neatly on the edge of tears, looking more and more like the hopeful boy she first fell in love with. She wanted to kiss him, but she didn't have the energy.

'Yes,' she smiled. 'We've had a boy.'

Rudy seemed to be rendered speechless for a moment. 'He's perfect,' he murmured.

'Why thank you, I made him myself.'

He raised an eyebrow at her and she couldn't help but grin back at him. 'Okay, that may not be strictly true, but I did most of the work!'

'True, true,' he conceded. 'Can I hold him?'

Liesel's grip tightened a little protectively on the child - her motherly attachment to the baby extending beyond her womb - yet she allowed Rudy to scoop him up, kiss the top of his grimy, little head and hold him close to his chest, rocking his son back and forth. He really was tiny compared to his father, a small mound of skin and bone, chirping in bewilderment at being suddenly removed from his mother.

'Thank you,' she said quietly.

'What for?' he asked as he gently transitioned his weight from one foot to the other to the rhythm of a lullaby.

'What do you think, saukerl? For him!' She looked up at them both, old and new, past and future, and knew for certainty that she had never loved anything more. Her little family. Family: a concept she thought she had lost forever. 'Thank you for him.'

The baby began to cry, a small, desperately vulnerable sound among the bustling, buzzing hospital outside of the doors. She had the urge to snatch him back and just hold him.

'I think he likes you better,' Rudy said, passing him back to Liesel.

'He damn well better. The little saukerl nearly killed me.' She smiled down at him as his cries gave way into sleep, shaking her head a little. 'Idiot.'

Rudy gazed affectionately down at his beautiful wife and child, and felt a swell of pride aching in his chest. His hand came up to stroke her damp hair as she settled back into the bed, resting her head on the white, iron teeth of the headboard.

'You've done so well,' Rudy said, dropping to a kneel beside the bed.

'I didn't think this far,' Liesel said thoughtfully. 'I didn't think what would come next.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well all I wanted to do was get this stupid little thing-' she kissed the tip of her son's nose, '-out of me. But I wasn't expecting to love him this much.' She was silent for a moment; one of those heavy silences, like a raincloud drifting through the dust.

'I've only known him ten minutes, and yet I would die for him,' she said finally and was struck with the gravity of this sentence, surprised at the truth in her words and the lengths she would go for this child. Her child.

And it was true. She hadn't expected the pure, uncompromising density of compassion that grappled her entire being and scattered all other matters in her mind. This had all been for Rudy. She went through with it for him, and him alone. She had barely come into making that choice, all biological soundings aside. It had been Rudy's child, not hers.

Liesel and Rudy gazed wearily at each other, then Rudy leant across and kissed her, long and tender. It was an exhaust of efforts, and she melted into it out of sheer tiredness. Her limbs ached from their eight hour contortion, her insides were unravelling like a mess of paper, words spilling out at the edges. He pulled away and rested his forehead on hers.

'Love you, saumensch,' he murmured.

'Love you too,' she replied, gradually drifting off into the warm, blissful oblivion of sleep.

She could only just make out his footsteps as he headed out into the blank, disinfectant corridors to reassure a worn out Max that yes, she was fine, and no, it wasn't a girl as he had predicted earlier, and yes, it was the most beautiful child they had ever laid eyes upon. Max would most likely visit at dawn once she had recovered enough to receive him.

Still curled up in her arms was her child. Their child. The victory she never thought she would achieve. The victory she didn't know she had wanted.

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**A/N: Again, thanks for your patience. I didn't intend for it to be so fluffy and cliché, but I guess that's how it ends up sometimes. I really hope that it was worth the wait and that I'll see you all again in the next chapter - which, by the way, has jumped back a few years.**

**Please remember to review. It means such a lot to me and makes me fangirl about 50% more during my day. Thank you for reading.**


	4. Dark

**A/N: This was originally going to be a one-shot by itself, but since I'm doing a chapter story, tah dah. Another chapter for you wonderful people.**

**Like I said, I don't own The Book Thief. If I did, I wouldn't have to write fanfiction.**

**Anyway, enjoy! And drop a review if you can because they really make my day.**

* * *

It was dark.

Thick and black, the kind of dark you could choke on if breathed in to heavily. The type of dark that would fill a child's eyes and rip away any concept of sleep. It was nightmare dark.

The only thing that separated the dark and the apprehensive faces sat huddled together was the frosty, yellow glow of the lanterns people had brought down.

The basement smelt of dust and sweat, and a good deal of cement. Paint tins lined up on the shelves, as solemn as soldiers. It was bitingly cold, slowly but surely eating away at any bare skin. Unseen yet overwhelmingly present was the inky, black night outside, swallowing the street in an unsettling stalemate against the Earth.

The boy looked around at them all, watching the dull, throbbing fear grip each face with each stray, far off sound. The falling bombs outside sounded like fat raindrops on a window, small and ugly, most likely leaving a messy trail of rubble and broken road. It was painfully silent in the large, stuffy room. As he took in the image, void of any joy or hope, he prayed that he wouldn't die like this, in someone's basement, with a bunch of semi-strangers.

***One Small Note***

**He wouldn't die that way.**

**Just so you know.**

Though the rest of his limbs felt like they were frozen over in the stillness, his left hand stayed warm. In it was clasped the hand of his next door neighbour, sweating a little in fear. He looked over at her. Her face was solemn and still. Though her fingers gripped his tightly in apprehension for any number of possibilities - most of which resulted in death - her expression remained calm, her almost-German eyes gazing ahead.

Her other hand was tracing the smooth, scratchy cover of her book._ Of course._ If there was one thing his best friend would choose to salvage from her home, a book would be far up on her list of priorities.

Even in the dark, he could recognise the title. The Whistler. He knew that book well, if not by the story, by its cover. He had managed to find that cover buried under the thick, black, December water of the Amper river. It had not been the easiest task he had ever performed, nor was it a task that her would happily do again. He would do it for her. Only her.

The pages still looked damp and crusty from its meeting with the water. The cover was littered with large watermarks, sprawled out like drops of ink on the front. Yet her fingernails caressed it lovingly like a child, as if it were her her closest and dearest friend. Yeah, well, it would have to get in line because he wasn't getting replaced by a mound of cardboard and paper.

Another bomb fell. Another raindrop. Her hand tensed in his grasp. The silence was suffocating. It ached in his lungs. It felt like each second drove him into near-madness; there was no noise except the tuneless, scraping song of friendship between girl and book and the heartbeat in a plane's ribcage.

There was a sound beside him, uncertain and quiet. A small, articulately spelled out word sliced through the silence and hung in the heavy air, verging on the edge of disappearing. He looked over at his neighbour again. The book was open in her lap, one hand gripping the edge in apprehension. Her lips were parted, halfway in the act of releasing another word, yet she held it back, confined behind her teeth for someone to let her continue.

Maybe it was that old aching longing for her to be happy - the one that drove him to the point of plunging into the depths of the river. Maybe it was the gut-wrenching lust for some kind of distraction from counting bombs. Whatever it was, he squeezed her hand reassuringly and - now without restraint - the words spilled joyfully from her lips.

He tried to let the story sink in, but truthfully, literature was never something the boy could even pretend to be interested in. Instead, he listened to her voice, the familiar, lilting, unsure sound of his best friend. He loved that sound.

Her voice made the air taste like thievery, and that amazing feeling that comes with getting away with it. It was the cause for that irritating knot at the base of his stomach that always tended to tighten whenever she got too close. It was never something he could have possibly explained, like she could have done easily. The boy was never great with words. The girl was. Generally, he let her do the talking.

The silence was no longer cold; it grew warm as the fear seeped away to the dusty corner, ready for when the distraction stopped and it could return to its rightful throne. It was a thoughtful silence, one where the slightest of disturbances could have climaxed in a mess of hushing and angry whispers. Her words filled the room, reached to the far edges of the crippling anxiety and pulled at the corners of mouths like puppet strings.

A small bite of jealousy ate the boy. There was something about the way everyone suddenly seemed so appreciative of her that made him squirm uncomfortably. Whatever happened, it could only be him and her. She was his, just like he belonged to her. It had been like that since the beginning. From the first 'How about a kiss, saumensch?' to the last theft.

This was probably very selfish - and childish - of him. But it was how it always had been. Whether stealing from life or giving back to life's outcasts, there would never be anyone else. No one.

The darkness became irrelevant; there was nothing but words. That's how it always should be, if only to make her happy.

He would build a world of words for her, one day, when he was grown up. Where there were no bombs, no evil little men with quadrilateral moustaches, no fear. Just him and her and her words. It seemed like a happy life.

Soon, the words would stop. He could see by the small mound of pages left that she had already been near the end. Her voice would cease, the flow of sounds grinding to a halt like the gears in clockwork. What happened when the words stopped? They would all be swallowed by the creeping gloom, eating away at the determinedly stoic pools of eyes until there was nothing left. Just broken husks of dead hope, gazing desperately round for any scraps of encouragement they could latch onto, when there was none.

There was a general sense clinging to their bones that when the words stopped, everything would end. As long as there was the presence of a distraction, they would all be okay.

***An Observation***

**This seemed to be a custom with humans.**

**As long as there was something to hold onto,**

**they would be fine.**

**It's all lies.**

He gripped her hand tightly, willing her to continue, not daring to interrupt. Because what else was there? The boy longed for the distraction like all the others, like the girl longed to provide it. They clung onto what was offered, savouring every golden syllable as they smothered the far off heartbeat no one wanted to hear.

What was once a great country was now reduced to cowering in neighbours' basements, from their own armies, their own evil government.

Yet she was the victory among failures. She was braver than all, braver than he. She knew the words and she made them hers. And she would keep reading, _had_ to keep reading, because there was nothing else. Because if she stopped, it would end, and they would lose. They would fail.

And it was with these disturbed, unsettling thoughts that the boy fell asleep, his yellow head resting on his beautiful best friend's shoulder, lulled away by her warm voice and the promises of a paper world and the corruption of bombs.

* * *

**A/N: I know it's pretty short, but I just wanted to do something from Rudy's point of view about when they were down in the shelter. And besides, I feel bad for not updating sooner, so I added this one on too.**


	5. Parade

**A/N: Hey guys. Sorry I've taken so long to update; there has been little to no inspiration for another chapter, so I've been experimenting a little with different ideas - none of which have worked. So bear with me.**

**Writers block sucks. Enjoy.**

* * *

***One Small Fact***

**Rudy Steiner often had no idea**

**what was going through Liesel Meminger's head.**

**But this occasion ranked fairly high on his list.**

It had been a shamelessly beautiful day when it happened.

The world was clothed in glorious, golden-green summer. There was a thick, acidic blue ocean of sky stretched out lazily above Molching, a handful of white clouds scattered across like scraps of ribbon - reminding Rudy absurdly and quite painfully of his father's workshop. The trees glowed like lanterns. The grass released a pleasantly intoxicating scent.

It was the type of day that belonged to Rudy and Liesel. A day of endless, childish, most likely illegal opportunities, laid out temptingly before them, ready to be stolen from such a corrupted, grey world ruled by odd little men with moustaches. A delicious taste of freedom that he knew above all else would taste so much sweeter when combined with thievery.

It should have been that type of day. It really should have been. Another perfectly unplanned theft to satisfy their lust for a victory.

But there was something unnaturally untrustworthy about how bright and seemingly happy the day was. The sunlight grinned down on Himmel unflinchingly - that sly, raised eyebrows grin that was usually found on the likes of Victor Chemmel - as if proving it had nothing to hide.

And no day in their lives had more to hide.

Maybe if they had known the events that were yet to come, they would have proceeded with more caution. Rudy would have stayed away all together, no question, if only just to protect Liesel. But there were many, many questions that clouded his next door neighbour herself.

Would she have stayed away, to hide and shield herself from the fear and despair of the day? Even at the cost of not knowing? Or would she have fought anyway? It's likely. But Rudy wasn't to know that. In fact, there was a very, very remote chance of him foreseeing any of the next few hours.

Often I wonder how certain events in time would have altered if they had gone differently, or if they had even happened. Then there's that possibility that everything is set in place to be endured and then forgotten, dissolving into dust as the seconds pass. Not that time has ever really been any of my concern. My heartbeat is outside of time, my timeline is a circle.

But time can be unforgiving: moving forcefully forward, forcing them forward into the terrifying unknown.

It was that on that stunningly beautiful morning, that Liesel and Rudy found themselves on Munich Street, on their way to the Bürgermeister's house, another theft only just a few minutes out of their reach. They were eating up the sunlight in the meantime, because sunlight of this density and magnitude only came round every now and then.

'...and if there are any more biscuits, feel free to take those as well,' Rudy had told her, as they laid out their plan.

Liesel shook her head in impatience. 'Rudy, I don't want to steal their food. Hell, I'm not even stealing-'

'Oh, of _course. _I almost forgot. You're _borrowing_-'

'Damn straight, dumkopf. Now why don't you leave the stealing- _borrowing_ to me?'

'What, and miss out on biscuits? You must be joking.'

Liesel laughed and gave him a push that came out a little harder than intended, and he stumbled.

'All right, all right, I'm sorry,' he said, holding his hands up in surrender. 'No biscuits.'

'No biscuits,' she confirmed.

'What about cakes?'

He braced himself for another shove, maybe a punch in the arm. It never came. He looked up in confusion to find Liesel's lips parted in the indignant shape of a retort, the words - much to Rudy's surprise - seemingly frozen on the edge of her tongue. Instead, silence ruled the air. Her entire body halted, and he wondered childishly for a moment if time had stopped.

It was only then that he noticed the rusty brown pools of her eyes were not focused on him, but behind him, as if he were a piece of glass.

Two thoughts struck Rudy Steiner simultaneously. One: a brief, selfish annoyance at the fact she wasn't paying him attention. Two: a gripping, overwhelming curiosity eating at his eyes to find out what just made the the words cease on the Book Thief's lips.

He turned, following his best friend's gaze, momentarily blinded by the mockingly bright sunlight, and saw his neighbours silently lining the pavement of Munich Street like gravestones. Then he saw why.

Jews.

They came in slowly like wisps of grey clouds, without a sound of any sort, except the dull, scraping heartbeat of their marching. They had faces made of cardboard. Their clothes hung from their bones. Their eyes were like stew, cold and exhausted, a vile and messy mixture of what they once were.

I would eventually meet all those eyes one day, some sooner than later. They're souls were so heavy with haunted memories. Some would beg me to take them, and what choice would I have? They deserved release from the torturous home of concentration camps.

Rudy watched them pass by - a river of dead eyes and cracked lips - and was reminded bizarrely of paper cut-out men, similar to the ones his younger sister enjoyed making. He looked at them, a parade of paper cut-out men.

It certainly was a beautiful day for a parade.

There was something unnaturally untrustworthy about how bright and seemingly happy the day was. Now he knew why.

It was all set out according to plan. Of course it was. Signed and sealed with a neat black swastika stamped lovingly at the centre. The so-called shit of the Earth was marched to its destruction while the world smiled and shut its eyes, murmuring 'Good riddance.' Rudy wondered savagely if the planet was one large Nazi Party, life just one big piece of propaganda. It had never seemed more likely.

He watched them, the heavy defeat that imprinted the ground with each footstep, the bitter questions on their thin, pale lips that would never be answered, and he wondered why. Why them. Why those men. They had lives once. They were children once, grew up like him, ran to their mothers when they had scraped their knee.

Now they were stripped of themselves, marked and stamped with a cold, harsh number on their forearm. That's who they were now. Numbers. Not even human beings, not even those children who ran to their mothers. Just millions and millions of numbers. It was perversely like a raffle of sorts: another number marked off on the checklist once they had won the prize - me. They didn't have names anymore.

In a twist of circumstance, it could have been him, or Liesel, or his brothers and sisters. It could have been anyone, but was them, and he didn't understand why. The question bloomed in his mind like a drop of ink in water, twisting and contorting in silent anger. Why, why, why. It hurt. The questions hurt.

He could vaguely hear the disapproving murmur of his older neighbours, the silence from others. He heard a man spit out in disgust, 'What is he looking at?' He wasn't quite sure who the culprit was, but he supposed it was what they considered an insolent piece of filth.

'Me.'

The word was so quiet, so inconsequential, so nonsensical, that he almost passed it off as a fragment of a far off sentence uttered by a bystander. Almost. But the voice was too dearly familiar to ignore, and caused him to tear his eyes away momentarily to his best friend beside him.

Her rusty eyes were wide in an expression he couldn't quite place. It verged on the edge of recognition, some kind of sudden understanding, but seemed to run so much deeper, piercing her heart and cutting close to her veins. Her fingers had curled into tight fists. He was surprised to find her trembling.

'Liesel?' he said tentatively.

'He's looking for me.' Her words were little more than a whisper, flat and cold.

He looked at her in confusion, 'Who is?'

She didn't reply, her lips were imprinted with silence. 'He's looking for me,' she murmured in wonder.

'Liesel?' His voice was edged with childish fear.

One word. One word was born behind the Book Thief's teeth, and fell from her lips like a droplet of water. There were no numbers. Just one word.

'Max.'

Then there was a blur of movement beside him, a flicker of almost-German hair rippling through the air as she launched herself into the wave of dead eyes and dead hope. It was less than a moment before she had disappeared among the collection of skin and bone and stumbling feet.

***One Small Fact***

**Rudy Steiner often had no idea**

**what was going through Liesel Meminger's head.**

**But this occasion ranked fairly high on his list.**

It was that moment when Rudy's heartbeat seemed to grind down to a halt in his chest, the seconds dragging slowly like a bag of sticky cement on the ground. The scandalised buzzing of his neighbours was suddenly buried away beneath the blurred thumping of his blood rushing to his head.

'Liesel!' he called, craning his neck in an attempt to see through the paper faces.

He could just see her weaving between them, the only colour in a monochrome circus. Her lips were parted in the shape of the same word, repeated over and over again, a word she nursed lovingly like a child.

Somewhere in the sunlit crowd, there was a halt. A man stopped and looked round at her. His hair looked like a birds nest, a halo of straw coloured twigs. Rudy could only just make out his eyes, a deep swampy brown that seemed to drip like syrup.

Liesel had also stopped as her eyes met the man's. There was a moment of speechlessness, heavy silence bearing down on them like a beast. Then she ran, practically fell, into his outstretched bones and they wrapped round her. The man was twice her height but her grip was strong on him.

She pulled away and held the man's face in both hands, and Rudy was reminded with a small heartbroken pang of how she did that to him sometimes. The air between them was filled with words, thick and wonderfully bittersweet. He could see the crystal beads falling from her eyes like rain, the way the man kissed her palms as she stroked his kindling beard.

From the corner of his peripheral vision, he saw a grey uniform emerge from the oblivion of his eyelid, march toward them. The uniform grabbed Liesel and shoved her to the side of the road. She yelped in pain but pushed herself to her feet regardless. Rudy felt a small swell of pride in his chest, that was quickly overshadowed by fear. He knew she was going to push this to the very limit. His Book Thief was brave like that.

He watched as Liesel pushed her way back to the man, and walked beside him, despite the fact the man seemed to be protesting. She was speaking, the words spilling out from the confines of her throat, falling to the ground as he tried to push her away.

_There was once a strange, small man._

The uniform had appeared once more, and began making its way towards the two.

_But there was a word shaker too._

The other Jews swerved morosely around the man as he stopped and faced her, the words still being born from her lips. Tears grappled her face as she spoke them, biting the beautiful, coldly observing sky. The uniform was closer, its face contorted in fury.

'_Is it really you?' the young man asked. 'Is it from your cheek that I took the seed?'_

The world had well and truly frozen now. Rudy watched in wonder as the last of the Jews stumbled past the two, leaving them isolated in the street. The sky held its breath. The audience of onlookers watched in perversely hungry silence. They were in for a show. The final act. The uniform was a few metres away. Let it begin, they thought. He could see it in their faces. Let it begin, the Nazi sky ordered. And it began.

There was the sound of the air ripping in half as the whip sliced through it. It caught the man squarely on the side of his neck, clipping his face and leaving a deep, neat cut. Liesel stepped forward in wild defiance, the tears burning her face. The whip. The whip was walking dangerously close to her.

She wasn't moving. Oh God, she wasn't moving.

'Liesel!' he yelled in panic, trying to shove his way through the wall of shoulders, the gravestones. 'Liesel, get out of there!'

The whip cut through the air, and Rudy got one look of Liesel glancing sadly over at him, before it hit her across her shoulder blade. The uniform lifted its arm again, and again. She crumpled like paper, hitting the ground like a stone, and Rudy visibly flinched as he struggled through the crowd. There was blood reaching across the back of her beautiful neck.

Rudy burst through the clumps of spectators, their cold, curious eyes cast across the small weeping girl and the filthy, beaten Jew as he was forced onwards, most likely to his death. It was a beautiful day to die.

He fell to his knees beside her in desperation. 'Liesel, get up. Oh God, you need to get up now, please, please, please get up.'

The words were hot in his mouth like blood and they poured over her limp form. He grabbed her under her arms and attempted to drag her back to the pavement. Tommy Muller ran over to assist him, twitching unhelpfully and making her limbs shudder.

Liesel appeared to come to, as she struggled to her feet. 'Max?' she screamed. 'Max, please!'

The last of the man's heavy footsteps were disappearing on the horizon, accompanied by the harsh march of the uniform, shoving him onward. She launched herself after him once again, fighting Rudy off and tearing up the street.

He could hear the muffled crack of her bony knees as he brought her crashing down to the ground. His arms were filled with struggling, his face filled with her hair, as she writhed in his grasp for freedom. Jabs of pain littered the boy's body as she fought wildly, her fists flailing into his skin.

He took each clumsily aimed punch like a gift to his system, each scrape of her fingernails a kiss. He clung to her, his eyes clenched shut, as he rode out the storm: the violent, passionate, heartbroken storm that was Liesel Meminger. His grip did not loosen for a heartbeat as he became entangled with her in a mess of aching limbs and teeth and cries of despair mingled with hope - a very dangerous combination.

'Let me go Rudy!' she shrieked. 'Let me go, or I swear, I'll kill you.'

Her savage screams rang out into the silence as the crowd watched in frost-laden pity, in mild disapproval, as if she were an unruly animal. He wanted to scream at them, send them away, throw something - anything - to break the harsh, indifference that clouded their faces like ice. They had no right. They had no damn right.

He knew he was hurting her. He knew he was hurting in more ways that one. It killed him, knowing what he was doing to her, knowing that the cries of pain and sadness were being caused by him. She was crying now. He could feel her trembling as the sobs wracked her body.

_It's because I love you. It's because I love you. _The words rang in his head, lodged halfway in his throat, never to be released._ I hurt you because I love you._

'Rudy, please,' she whined, 'Let me go.'

Still he held on to her, holding her close, until the sound of marching dissolved into the soft summer breeze. The world was content with the show it had been given, now it had moved on in boredom, leaving the girl and the boy forgotten.

Slowly, Rudy loosened his grip on her, separating himself from the tangled knot of limbs that they had once been. They pushed themselves to their feet, dusting the gravel off their torn clothes.

He looked at her, with her bruised fists and a bleeding neck. Her face was covered in grime with race-struck tear-stains cutting through it, her watery eyes wide with questioning. It was always the same question. Why, why, why. Why did you stop me. Why wouldn't you let go.

_It's because I love you, more than you know._

The words never came. Instead, he stepped forward and pulled her into a hug, wrapping his arms carefully around her cut up shoulders. She fell into his arms in defeat, burying her face in his neck. He could feel her wet tears pressing into his skin.

'I hate you, Rudy Steiner,' she whispered.

He laid a small kiss where the whip had bitten the tender skin of her neck. 'I know.'

They stayed there, wrapped in embrace, marvelling at the remains of what could have been a victory. They had set out to steal, yet had been stolen from. He had watched as the Book Thief - his Book Thief - was taken apart and beaten and undone to her last thread. They hadn't been prepared.

She pulled away, wiping the remnants of her despair from her eyes, then looked at him solemly.

'I need to tell you something.'

* * *

**A/N: Why the actual fuck did they not include this scene in the movie? It's friggin emotional as hell and all they do is have her wander around a crowd of Jews. Stupid movie makers. Should have asked me to make the damn movie.**

**Anyway, all ranting aside, I hope you enjoyed the chapter. It's not completely true to the book, but it's close enough. Please leave a review, it makes me so happy. And sorry again for the wait, I won't let it happen again.**


	6. Youth

**A/N: Hey guys. TotoroBird seems to be back in business. Huzzah!**

**Anyway, this has jumped forward several years. It's an idea I've had for a while, and I hope it goes as well as I hope it will.**

* * *

Hans grew up looking very much like his father.

His bright blonde hair remained a defiant shade of lemon. His smile - once he had mastered the concept - was definitely more of a smirk than anything. Yes, Hans was certainly a lot like his father. But though the Steiner gene reigned strong in him, there was no doubt that his large round eyes of metallic brown were a gift from his mother.

Hans rarely stopped talking - or his own undeveloped, babbling version of talking that most toddlers engage in conversation with - to the point where Liesel would happily hold his lips together so that not another word could escape from behind his jagged little teeth. He was incapable of sitting still for more than fifty five seconds - a scientifically proven fact, timed by Rudy himself - and found himself constantly moving about. Liesel and Rudy would watch out the window in mild amusement as he lapped the small, stubby tree in their back yard, yelling half-formed, on-the-edge-of-recognisable words and sending a spray of dirt and triumph all over the ground.

'Look at him go,' Liesel commented.

'Yeah. Where the hell did he get the energy?' Rudy watched in surprise as he set off once again, tearing round the garden.

'Well that's certainly a familiar sight,' she pointed out thoughtfully. 'Next thing you know, he'll be stealing charcoal from the fireplace and painting himself black.'

'Very funny,' Rudy said. Then after some thought, 'Though I probably wouldn't burn any wood for a while.'

'Good plan. By the way, it's your turn to put him to bed tonight.'

'Nice try, saumensch. I did it last night.'

'Damn it.'

One of Hans' more entertaining attributes was his longing to keep his Uncle Max firmly on his toes. Liesel would turn her back for a minute, let her gaze flit away in a brief daydream, and look back to find Max laid out on the floor with an expression of utmost fear plastered to his face as Hans kneeled giggling on his chest with a collection of dead leaves from the garden spilling through his fingers over Max's head. Then Liesel would save Max from a faceful of tree carcass. Sometimes.

They would come home from work to find the two of them running round the house in various states of character, with hats and scarves and gloves strewn across their heads and odd accents and voices winding through the air. Liesel learnt long ago not to question the strange games they played during the day, nor try and hear the stories behind them, for more often than not, they made absolutely no sense. Though it didn't stop her wrapping a scarf around her face, putting on a deep growling voice and joining in herself.

Long after Liesel, Rudy and Max had exhausted all their efforts, Hans would remain, spurred on in bounds of enthusiasm and loud, often unrecognisable soliloquies - consisting of a mostly random chain of sounds.

He was a Steiner through and through. Jesse Owens in miniature, and twice as energetic. But there was a great deal of Meminger buried away under his childish face. More than either Liesel or Rudy expected.

***Hans Steiner's First Word***

**Book**

As Hans' speech and vocabulary began to grow, it became a common occurrence that Liesel often found a small, inch wide gap between the books that resided on her bookshelf. As her fingers played the rough, colourful spines of her collection like piano chords, each one another key in her personal symphony, she'd find a wrong note, where her fingers would slip and miss.

This was the alarm bell, now weathered and rusty with overuse, that would cause her eyes to roll, her head to shake in affectionate irritation, and send her following a trail of small muddy footprints leading out of her and Rudy's bedroom.

She would find him invariably curled up and buried under his duvet, his little fingernails following the black ink markings as they scattered across the page like seeds in a snowy white field. His eyes would soak up the words, pick them up and weigh them in his fingers like delicious penny sweets his father would bring home for him sometimes.

He would look up at her, rich brown eyes wide with an unbearably adorable mixture of fear and guilt - that unconsciously smug expression of sheepishness that she had originally thought only Rudy could ever be able to achieve.

Usually, she would give him a cocked-eyebrow expression that clearly stated 'hand it over' and he would sulkily push the book, eyes tinged with mutiny, into her outstretched hand. But as her books continued to go missing over the next few months, stolen by the tiny hands of a thief, she decided to ask him the question. The questions she had been asked at the age of nine by her son's beloved namesake.

'Do you know what they say?' she asked one morning, pointing to the pretty signs imprinted on the paper.

Hans shook his head mutely, clutching the book in curling, grubby fingers.

She knelt down beside his bed so that their identical eyes were level and smiled. 'Do you want to know what they say?'

Hans' eyes widened in elation and he squeaked out a little, 'Ja.'

Liesel grinned and sat down on his mattress, pulling him onto her knee and opening the book. And this was how the Book Thief's son learnt to read.

Reading with her son was possibly only moment of stolen piece, the only moment that Hans would actually shut up. He broke the record for sitting still by several minutes - again, a scientifically proven fact, timed by Rudy himself.

He would eat up the words as they expanded and grew meaning, blooming and unfurling like flowers before his eyes. Liesel would watch his eyebrows join together in a frown as the sounds rolled tentatively off his tongue, falling into his lap. And she would smile as the nostalgia unfolded about her, as she saw herself at nine years old sat in the basement, a book lying open in her lap while she tested the words on her lips.

It would always begin with a theft. There was never an occasion where Liesel would have to lift her son up so he could pick out a book on a higher shelf. There was never a day when Liesel got an insight on what they were to be reading before they read it. No, it always - and most likely would always - begin with a theft.

And truthfully, Liesel let it. Whenever she found that gap in her stories, that missing note in her tune, she felt a small, golden sense of pride swelling up beneath her ribcage like a song squeezed out between the smiling teeth of accordion bellows. It clung to her heart like cement, in the way that maternal love tends to do.

The Steiners could claim this boy as their own all they wanted, and he would fit right in. But there was a great deal of Meminger weaving through his veins.

He was her own little Book Thief.

And so, at the age of four, as Liesel and Rudy watched him march solemnly into Kindergarten on his chubby little legs, they weren't wholey surprised that he had a book clutched to his chest.

***The Book He Brought With Him***

**Mein Kampf**

**Otherwise known as**

**The Stand-Over Man**

'Come on, let's go home,' Liesel mumbled, hastily wiping her eyes after they watched their son submerge into a pool of grinning children.

They headed back to their house, contentedly observing as the last of the summer bled into another crisp Autumn. Rudy unlocked the door and they stood on the threshold of their home, suddenly filled with a sense of emptiness as the silence swallowed them up.

'It's so quiet,' she said in mild wonder.

'Because that damn kid never shuts up,' Rudy pointed out, 'I don't think I've heard proper silence in four years.'

'I don't doubt it.' They shut the door and headed into the living room where Liesel dropped into a chair. 'I can't believe he's started kindergarten. Last time I checked, he was coming out of me.'

'What a day that was,' Rudy grinned nostalgically.

'Says you, saukerl. You buggered off halfway through then came back at the very end.'

'And yet, I regret nothing,' he said with finality. Liesel laughed.

They looked at each other and smiled sheepishly. 'Well, we have the house to ourselves for the first time in years. I have the day off from the bookshop. What do you want to do?' she asked.

'I dunno. What the hell do we do with ourselves now that the mini canon ball has gone?'

'Now there's a good question,' Liesel said slowly.

'I feel old.'

'Rudy, we're twenty eight. That's not old,' she informed him.

He shrugged. 'I _feel_ old. I never said we _were_ old.'

Liesel sat up suddenly in her seat, a glint blooming in her rust-ridden eyes. There was a small dent curving out of nowhere in the straight, slightly bored line of her mouth.

'You feel old?' she enquired.

'A little,' he said, a tad defensively.

A sly smile formed on her lips. 'Oh really?' She pushed herself up from her seat and took a step towards him.

'Really,' he replied.

Obviously, he hadn't caught the hint; instead, it floated round his ears then fell to the ground, as insubstantial as feathers.

'I bet I-' She took another step, '-can prove you wrong.' One more step and she was only a mere few centimetres away from him. This time, the hint hit him square in the face and understanding dawned on his features.

'And how would you do that?' he asked with a smirk, cocking his head to the side a little.

'I think you know,' she smiled sweetly.

'I think I do know,' he conceded.

He leant forward a little, so that his mouth only just grazed the rough, delicate skin of her lips. Then he whispered, making deliberately sure that every word that rolled off his tongue dripped down her throat and into her lungs:

'Let's go steal some apples.'

Liesel grinned. 'Hell yeah.'

Gripped with sudden energy, they bounded into the hallway, dragged on their jackets and headed out of the door and into the street.

'Herr Schneider's place?' Rudy called over his shoulder to her as she locked the door.

'Where else?'

He grinned and let her weave her arm through his. They began to walk slowly, in a pointedly casual manner, down the street, towards the man's house, all the while trying to avoid cracking into mischievous grins.

***A Few Facts About Arnold Schneider***

**+ He was a retired accountant**

**+ He was an avid supporter of the Nazi Party**

**+ He disliked Jews with a passion**

**+ He enjoyed walking his two terriers around the block**

**+ He owned a glorious orchard**

Herr Schneider was generally disliked in the Steiner household for his blatant distaste for Max's visits. On his many shuffling endeavours out into the street with his two old, yapping atrocities, he would mutter mutinously whenever Max was in his line of sight, sometimes calling out various Nazi propaganda abuses - usually along the lines of 'scum' and 'lousy sympathisers' and 'in my day'. Rudy would then restrain Liesel from calling back. Sometimes.

'Oh yeah?' she would yell. 'I bet you'd love to hear that he hid in my basement for years, and your precious party never found him!'

Generally, this would result in more angry muttering and filthy glares thrown at the three of them. Sometimes, Hans would join in with his mother's defiance, yelling nonsensical words that didn't quite reach any meaning, but the anger was there and easy enough to distinguish. Then, as he got older, and the sounds began to form some kind of recognition, it was always along the lines of, 'Leave Uncle Max alone!'

That child was definitely their's.

Liesel and Rudy headed up the road, their eyes roaming the houses for any onlookers, though I doubt it would have made much of a difference. They were out to steal apples. They were out to steal back their youth.

Herr Schneider's house was a papery grey square that sat, squat and squalid, at the end of the street, like an overturned sack of thick cement. The little front garden was also square, neatly sliced down to sharp, grim perpendicular angles. It gave the overall impression of someone who had just spilled a geometry set all over the floor and hadn't been bothered to pick it up.

The two of them swerved in a fairly conspicuous manner into the alleyway running along side the man's house. Their pace had unconsciously sped up in giddy excitement. Liesel could hear her heartbeat drumming away in her ribcage.

The orchard was a golden, rosy red affair, bound by a fence of thick, grey wire. Apples hung from the branches of pale green covered oak like baubles. The leaves glowed in the sunlight, murmuring tuneless, rustling monologues in the afternoon breeze.

Liesel dragged Rudy down into a crouch behind a row of bushes that lined the foot of the fence. They gazed through the leaves at the back window of the house that overlooked the orchard.

'There he is,' Rudy murmured, pointing towards the hunched figure just visible through the glass.

'That bastard,' she muttered, glaring at the man as he sat gazing sourly out at the trees.

'We need a plan of some sort,' Rudy said in a low voice.

'Rudy, when have we _ever_ had a plan?'

'Well, if you hadn't noticed, we're a tad bigger than we were at twelve. It needs more thinking through.'

'I never thought I'd see the day when you actually thought things through-'

'Oh very funny. But seriously, don't you want to plot it out?'

'What's to plot? We get in, take some apples, and get out. There you go.'

Rudy looked like he was about to argue, when the muffled yet distinct sound of barking dogs brought their attention back to the house. Liesel didn't know much about dogs per say, but barking could only mean a few things. Food, intruders, or walk. She hoped very much that it was the last one.

'Here's our chance,' she murmured, as Schneider disappeared from sight, advancing in a crouch to the fence.

'Now?' he exclaimed incredulously. 'Why now?'

'Because his back is turned, you dipshit. Now come here and boost me up.'

She saw a grin curving on his lips, despite himself, and she knew that it was mirrored by her own. He walked forward and knelt down, cupping her foot in his hands and shoving her upward into the air so that she swung her leg over the fence and jumped down. A moment later and he had climbed the fence himself, leaping to the ground beside her.

'We need to be quick,' she said, keeping her eyes locked to the window.

'Oh really? I thought we might invite him to have a picnic with us,' came his sarcastic reply, and she bit down on a retort swelling up in her throat. There were more important matters to deal with.

Keeping the window forever present at the edge of their peripheral vision, they headed for a tree each and began tugging the lush, Autumnal apples from their nest of golden-green leaves. The barking seemed to be growing fainter, and she couldn't tell if this was a good sign or not: whether it ended in an empty house or the reappearance of their antagonist was not necessarily clear, but she sped up all the same, filling her pockets with whatever she could fit in.

'Liesel, he's coming back,' Rudy's voice came from behind her, the words hitting her across the shoulder, and she looked up to see a figure moving about within the living room.

Immediately, they ducked down where they stood, staying close to the trees in the hopes that they might just get away without detection.

'How do we get out?' she whispered fiercely across to him.

'I dunno,' he whispered back. 'Jump the fence, I guess.'

She peeked out from behind her tree, and instantly ducked behind it again, but not before she had made eye contact with the Herr Schneider, stood looking out suspiciously at the tree. His eyes widened in fury and he began to shuffle out the room.

'Shit.'

'_Shit_.'

The back door seemed to be in the process of being unlocked. Rudy held out his hand to her and she ran for it as panic grappled her thoughts. He hurriedly knelt down and boosted - practically threw - her up once again. She tumbled over the top of the fence, landing at an awkward angle and sending a stab of icy, sharp pain up her heel. A moment later, Rudy had climbed over the fence himself.

'Come on!' he cried, and Liesel stumbled achingly to her feet.

They began to run, apples spilling from their pockets like blood, as the door flew open and the middle aged man came storming out. She caught one last glimpse of Arnold Schneider following them with his outraged grey eyes before they slid out of view and had reached the street again. She could still hear his gruff, angry voice mingling with the trees.

And then she could hear Rudy's laughter, ringing out in the air as the wind rushed wonderfully past them. Her feet pounded the ground in time with the wild beat of her heart. The warm September air tore in half as they ran, pushing aside the cool breeze. Her only distinguishable thought in the mess and jumble of emotions battling out in her mind was the image of her and Rudy, at the dawn of their teenage years, also running for their lives with armfuls of apples.

They had done it. They had stolen back their youth.

'Victory!' Rudy yelled in triumph, sweeping Liesel up off her feet and spinning her round so that she laughed in a daze of giddy euphoria.

He leaned in, catching her lips mid-laugh so that it fizzed and spilled over his mouth, tasting gloriously of thievery and apples. She wrapped her arms around his neck, grinning into his mouth, and knowing that it was his own grin that was imprinted on her lips. He released her, setting her back to her feet, and they gazed at each other, basking in the glory of their triumph and the delicious sense of daring that came with it.

'So do you still feel old?' she asked with a smile, her arms still draped around his neck.

'Not in the least,' he said, punctuating each word with a kiss.

'Good. I knew I could prove you wrong,' she said.

He grinned down at her, 'Yes, dear.'

She aimed a small slap upside his head. Then sobriety bloomed on her features and she looked up at him.

'Well, I guess now is as good as any time,' she muttered to herself.

'What is it?' Rudy looked endearingly confused and she swallowed the smile that threatened to resurface.

Her rusty brown eyes met his icy blue and held them. 'I have to tell you something.'

'Liesel?'

She took a deep breath, as if hoping to fill her lungs with courage for the words which would no doubt alter their lives yet again.

'Rudy, I'm sort of pregnant.'

* * *

**A/N: So I hope you enjoyed it, I had a lot of fun writing it, especially the beginning as it was good to expand young Hans' character, and truthfully, I'm glad it worked out as well as I intended.**

**Please review, thanks for sticking with me this long and, as always, thanks for reading.**


	7. Loss

**A/N: Hey guys. This chapter is going to be pretty angsty and is set a few years after Youth, so brace yourselves, it's going to be dark as hell.**

**Just so you know, this is practically in two halves. One: Death and Liesel. Two: Rudy and Liesel. So this isn't exactly going to be a picnic.**

* * *

***One Small Fact***

**I may have before mentioned that I truly dislike the colour white.**

**This is why.**

The sky was dripping.

It was one of those occasions where the world plays tricks on you. When the sky is an ocean of sunlight and rain and colour after colour, mingled together so that you can't tell one from the other.

Damp, grey clouds fill the air while the sun paints them darker, a mess of gold-brown-grey, light bursting and spilling out from the cracks in the cement sky. It's like a canvas of watercolour: one drop of rain could send all these brushes of silver, gold and grey cascading out of balance, revealing a glorious spectrum of blues and pinks and yellows.

It's the type of day I relish. The type of day I could just wrap myself in. A beautiful day to live. A beautiful day to die.

But I can't say I'm smiling.

The Book Thief certainly isn't smiling.

And it's partly my fault.

There she is. Sat in her bedroom, in the centre of the large bed she shares with Rudy. Her eyes are glazed over and metallic, watching the rain make pretty patterns with the sunlight on the window. Shadows of crystal raindrops are scattered over the floor, over the bed, over every surface the dark light reaches. They litter her face, cast across the rusty pools of her eyes, and they divide her features into fragments, like cracked glass.

She looks broken. She _is_ broken. Her life lies in pieces around her, a corner of her having been torn off and shattered in recent events. Her fingers reach for the pieces - maybe she can put it back together - but they dissolve like dust in her hands. So instead, they knot in the tangled bed sheets beneath her, for something to hold onto. Because if there's nothing to hold onto, how does she know she's still there?

And deep, deep down - buried beneath her lungs and protected by her ribcage where it grows and evolves by day - is the hope that she's not still there. That none of it's real.

It was very real, however. I was there. I stood in the middle of it, my hands outstretched. It's my job after all.

***Forty Two Hours Prior***

**We find ourselves again in a hot, white room.**

**Liesel is on her back, her knees to her chest,**

**in another intense battle with her own body.**

**The pain is worse than it's ever been.**

**A nurse is shaking her head.**

From the beginning, something was wrong.

It hadn't been nine months. It had only been eight. For the last two occasions, she was always a week or two late. This time, she was a month early.

_May 23rd was a still night, the type of night that could be likened to a sheet of cool, clear glass stretching across the world from horizon to horizon. The sky was unburdened by clouds; the stars were stripped of any cover and were exposed, drowned in a sea of deep blue velvet darkness. The air was concrete, frozen over with delicately intricate webs of frost, biting at the edges of windows and laying kisses at the corners of the metal fences that ensnared houses like cages._

_The silence was shattered as the whining scream of a white vehicle tearing through the cold, spring night - KRANKENWAGON stamped in bold red letters across the front and back. It wove, wailing desperately through the streets, hurtling towards the small, German suburban house where she resided._

_The vehicle screeched to a halt outside the house. The door opened and a man got out and walked towards the front door of the house. The window is open - a stupid idea on such a cold, quiet night - and he can hear loud groans from inside, the panicked yell of a man, and the sleepy questions of two, maybe three, children. His fist raised and knocked on the door._

_I stood in the shadows and watched as the door was wrenched open by the man in his early thirties with lemon yellow hair, which was currently sticking out at odd angles in a mix of insomnia and fear. Some formal, yet strained, words were exchanged between the two men, then the latter turned and disappeared back into the house, reappearing a moment later with a woman about the same age, her almost-blonde hair falling over her face as one hand gripped her husband, the other gripping her swollen belly._

_I knew this girl. I knew the boy too. I knew them as children. I knew them as adults. They knew me too. We have known each other for so many years, sometimes by choice, sometimes not. _

_And though I couldn't necessarily determine the reason why I was here tonight, why I was being drawn to the woman, I hoped that it wasn't her. Maybe that was selfish - and it most likely was - but it couldn't be her._

_The woman staggered out of the house, being held up by the man with lemon hair, breathing heavily under the weight of her stomach. She stumbles, nearly falls, and winces in pain, and her husband catches her, murmuring words to her. She looks afraid, but the man kisses her cheek and helps her into the back of the vehicle. _

_Two children are stood at the door: a boy and a girl. The boy looks a lot like the man and looks seven to eight years old. His rusty brown eyes are wide in anxiety, an expression so reminiscent of his mother that I have to catch another glance of the woman to see if it is in fact the same face. The girl beside him is half his size, and, by the looks of it, half his age. Her hair is wild and half-blonde, like her mother's, her eyes icy blue and barely open, glued together with sleep. Her brother holds her up by her small chubby hand, and nudges her every now and then to rouse her._

_The white doors are closed, and the man walks to the front seat of the vehicle and gets in. He looks sadly out at the lemon haired man and his two children - as he whispers small comforts to them, tells them that their mother is going to be fine, that their uncle is going to pick them up - and he thinks that this can only have one ending. He and I both know the ending. I wish I didn't._

_The vehicle drives away and I follow it. The woman inside is laid on a stretcher in the back of the vehicle clutching her bump, groaning as a gripping pain blossoms in her abdomen, flooding her veins and unfurling in her blood like ink in water. Her breathing is coming in short rasps. Oxygen suddenly seems to retreat from her, withering in her lungs and leaving her breathless._

_The minutes drip into one another, slowly and sweetly, smiling down upon the woman as she writhes in agony, holding her stomach in desperation. She's done this before. Twice. But it's never been this intense. It's never hurt like this._

_They reach the hospital and she is rushed in. Her screams paint the walls black as the wildly tender aching waves crumble through her bones. There is a terribly familiar rush between her thighs and she cries out in fear. It can't be happening. It just cannot be happening. It had only been eight months._

_She is laid down on a hospital bed. Nurses and doctors flood the room like insects, buzzing and fluttering about. The woman wanted to throw something at them, yell at them to get out and shut the hell up - typical of her - but another wave of crippling pain strangled a cry of anguish out of her. Her chest feels like it's going to snap in two, like she'll be impaled on her own heaving ribs._

_Let it begin, the Nazi sky ordered. Let it begin._

_The hours drag by, tearing her to pieces, minute by minute. Each wave leaves enough time to recover, enough time to build herself up before she must inevitably fall, break into more fragments, then repeat. Her breaths are ripped from her throat with the force of a beast._

_Her skin crumbles with sweat, her knees once again are shoved up to her chest as she struggles with her own body, her own flesh and blood mutinous beneath her. Her fingernails bury deep into her thighs, and there's beads of blood at the conjunction between teeth and bottom lip. She can taste the crimson salt leaking onto her tongue, and it burns her throat, as she screams out._

_'It's coming.'_

_There they are again. Those wonderful, wonderful words. This is the third time they've graced her thoughts, smoothing over the pain like snow. __It's coming, it's coming, it's coming. _

_But there was something wrong, something disturbingly haunting about harshness that laced the nurse's words like frost. The woman's eyes slid open a little and looked at the nurse who stood between her thighs, her head shaking mournfully._

_She didn't understand. Why was she shaking her head? It's coming! Finally. I watched as her expression darkened: from relief to confusion. And something else._

_Her dangerous metallic eyes grew sharp, a glint of paralysing fear dawning in the rusty bronze pools like lightning struck water. They flit over the grim, grey faces of the doctors and nurses around her and it hits her with the force of a punch to the gut__. Something's wrong. Something's wrong._

_She tries to sit up, but the nurses push her back into the bed. She demands to know what's going on; they turn away without an answer to give. She drags the hair from her eyes, trying to see what was occurring beneath her. The colour she sees is red._

_It's coming. Oh God, it's coming._

_And then her body was spiralling out of control, down into another storm, another battle ripping through her system. It shatters her, dragging the screams from her lungs, and she's left helpless, crying out for her husband. His name slips from her lips in a cracked glass whimper as she collapses back into the bed._

_It wracks her body, sending her into wild contortions. The nurses rush around in panic, and her screaming fills the air. __Her insides clench painfully and there is the familiar slippery rush between her thighs. _

_And then it is over. _

_Silence crumples over the room like a slab of silk, slipping over the walls and dragging down any sounds clinging to the walls. The woman sinks back into her pillows, eating up the oxygen as it grazes her cheek. She doesn't notice me._

_I step forward. I pick up the baby - a small bloody mound of soft, tender flesh and toothpick bones. She sleeps in my arms, peaceful and light. One of those wonderful souls that don't come struggling, but simply drift into my outstretched hands. I look down at her face, the tiny, scrunched up features and the finely detailed piano key ribs that protrude from her thin, weak chest._

_She is so little, so insignificant, yet a beautiful soul to hold, and I find myself rocking her a little in my cold, dead arms. Sadness drifts through my bones, like a flurry of rain. I shouldn't be the one holding her; it should be her mother. She isnt the first to hold her daughter. I am. And I am the last._

_I look over at the woman. She has painstakingly sat up, questions leaving her her lips, over and over, to ears that are determinedly not hearing her. She can see them carrying away her baby, and she's asking them why. She tries to get to her feet, but her limbs ache and she collapses back into the bed. She doesn't understand. _

_The doctor is taking her baby out of the room, and she yells at him to bring her back. She struggles to sit up, shouting and crying out for her child. The nurses rush to her side, a thousand hands restrain her as she thrashes out, screaming in fury and grief._

_There is a constant murmur of small comforts from either side of her like the insistent buzz of pesky insects. Her fists flail out in a passionate anger, and her wrists are caught by a strong grip. Her head whips round, ready to hurt, ready to maim, ready to goddamn murder if she could only see her child, and finds herself facing her husband._

_A brief, deliciously sweet relief washes over her as her dried-sweat fingers reach out to touch his face. But his face is wet with tears that cling to his cheeks. She doesn't know why. Then the panic set in again, and she struggles to get out of the bed, launching herself towards the door where her baby had disappeared. The man caught her, dragging her back into the bed, stroking her hair and holding onto her for dear life like he has so many times in the past. He frantically murmurs words into her ear as she cries out, begging them to bring her back, to let her have her child._

_But now it's no longer them she addresses. She addresses me, and only me. She asks why I took her, why I took her baby, her flesh and blood. But I am not equipped for those questions. Her wails ring out in the deafening silence. She weeps for her lost one, and I am so sorry, ever so sorry, that it's me rocking the girl, and not her. That I stole the her daughter away from her. _

_And her wild cries of anguish are the last thing I hear as I carry the little girl's soul away, and all I can see is white. The colour of lost innocence and dying children._

***One Small Fact***

**I may have mentioned that I truly dislike the colour white.**

**This is why.**

Fresh, salty tears spilled from Liesel's eyes, and she could taste them on her lips. Her fingers moved slowly from the knotted bed sheets to her bump, now a lot smaller but not completely gone, the incriminating evidence of her failure. Of her loss.

Her face looked like the sky, pale and heavy with rain. Her eyes never left the veins etched on the glass pane from the precipitation racetracks. The grief lies dying in her chest, rotting and dissolving to dust as her body shut down on itself. No food had touched her throat in days. She had had no contact with water, nor had she washed. Her skin still tasted of harsh disinfectant and sweat. She smelt of white.

But most prominently, her lips were dry of words. None had been grown from her tongue like flowers since the screaming ended. Not a sound had escaped her exhausted lungs, torn and rusted with her cries. It wasn't the first time she had forgotten how to speak.

There was the first time her feet met with the hard, concrete ground of Himmel, when her eyes still ached with the absence of her mother; there was the dusty tears spilt over carcass of her home after it rained bombs and snowed ash, and Himmel was no more; and there was now.

By no means was this the first time.

But it didn't make it hurt less.

The air was filled with the unholy, harsh stench of white. It emanated from her like light, and hatred bloomed in her, burning in her chest. She hated herself. She hated that smell. It clung to her bones, sticky and clean and blank and it destroyed her from the inside, eating her away. The colour of lost innocence and dying children.

There was no Liesel anymore. Just white.

The urge to destroy that heavy scent pieced her heart, tangled in her ribs, overwhelmed her, and she found herself sliding off the bed and stumbling to her feet. Her legs were unsteady beneath her from disuse, and she staggered into the wall and slid down to the floor. A groan of frustration bubbled through her blood, and she reached up, digging her sparse fingernails into the chipped, painted windowsill as she dragged herself back up.

She took a minute to regain her breath, clutching the windowsill for support, her forehead resting against the cool, sky-stained glass. Then she let go, letting her feet work upon instinct. It was oddly humiliating, trying to remember how to walk, and she was glad Rudy wasn't around to watch it.

She fell from one ledge to another, gripping the doorframe with both hands. Her fingers fumbled with the doorknob and she pulled the door open. She headed into the hallway, stumbling through the half light. The bathroom was at the end of the hall, and she made her way slowly, but surely towards it, silent fury pulsing through her.

It was following her everywhere. The more it stung her lips and grazed her skin, the more anger she felt towards herself, and this stupid world. She had to get it off her, if it was the last thing she did. The door to the bathroom fell open as she barged through it, slamming into the porcelain sink and hearing the distinct crack of open of her ribs.

She fell to the floor, clutching her side as a pained moan slipped from her throat, yet once again, she reached up to the smooth basin and hauled herself up. As she filled her thirsty lungs, she caught sight of herself in the mirror a over the sink.

Her half-blonde hair was a tangled mess of wisps and knots, matted and unwashed for days. Large, black crescent moons laced the edges of her wide, rust-filled eyes. Her lips were cracked and pale. She looked quite demented, her face filled with grief - the same face of the fourteen year old girl as her world fell apart around her.

She glared at her reflection in pure, unrestrained hatred. Such a pathetic wretch, staring back at her, stealing her eyes and her mouth and her nose and wearing them herself as if she owned them. They were identical in everything, from the anger that burned more brightly with every scrape of oxygen right down to the small bump protruding from under the skin of her stomach.

How dare she. How dare she claim that child, that beautiful child she never got to meet, as her own. The fingers that gripped the edges of the basin, as they curled into pale fists, moved protectively to her swollen belly. The girl in the mirror mimicked her.

_There's nothing there._

She knew there was nothing there. She knew there was nothing there. But it didn't stop her clutching her stomach as if there was a child in her arms. As if she had lived. As if her baby hadn't gone from her grasp before she could hold her.

_There's nothing there._

She heard the words leave her identical antagonist's lips. She saw them steam up the glass. And she found her heart pounding with rage.

How dare she. How _dare_ she.

_There's nothing there._

With a horrible scream of fury, her fist flew at the identical girl, shattering her face into a thousand pieces. She could see hundreds of fragmented metallic eyes glaring at her from the spiderweb glass, and she slammed her crimson knuckles back into her döppelganger's hateful broken gaze. Another shriek of wild, heartbroken anger was spat into the pieces of reversed bathroom that littered the floor.

'How dare you?' she screeched, blood dribbling down her hands and falling in beads onto the tiles like rose petals. They made pretty patterns on the floor. 'How dare you?'

She sank to her knees, surrounded by herself, in a pool of her own blood and reflection. Sharp glass sliced through her skin, burying beneath her flesh as she wept, as she wept for the piece of her that she had lost. That had broken from her, just like the mirror. Her trembling fingers reached for the pieces of glass, the fragments of her life, trying to find her baby. Where had that girl taken her? Where did she take her daughter to? But with every piece of mirror, she found the girl, staring back at her in panic, tear drops staining the glass as they fell from her eyes.

She let out a long, heartbroken cry, collapsing onto the ground as she held the remainder of her child in both hands, rocking back and forth. The last thing she remembered as the darkness swallowed her eyes was the sound of the door flying open and her name repeated over and over in panic.

***On May 25th, 1961***

**The Book Thief lies passed out on her bathroom floor.**

**I had the choice to take her then.**

**It probably would have been the right thing to do.**

**Merciful, even.**

**But I suppose I am a coward when it comes to these things.**

Liesel's eyes slid open to a warm, dark room. She was laid on her bed, curled up on her side. She looked around in confusion then winced in pain as the side of her face brushed against the duvet. She forced herself into a sitting position, her fingers creeping up to touch her cheek. Slicing across her skin was a long, thin gash, and she gasped as she looked around for a mirror of some kind - because that was obviously a very good idea, considering.

She didn't quite know what was going on, how she got here, nor how much time had passed. Her eyes struggled to reach the sky with as little movement as possible and saw that it was still dripping but was a deep watery violet, stretched across the world like a brush of watercolour. She stayed there for several minutes, just gazing at the beautiful, beautiful sky.

The door opened and she turned her head, albeit awkwardly, to see Rudy stood in a corridor of light.

There was a word. An insignificant, one-syllabled, three-letter word. But she knew it well, wonderfully, painfully well. It was the word that pulled her into the strong arms of the Amper River; the word that dragged her out of the bones of her former home; the words that filled the air after their first night together. It was a word that meant nothing to everyone else. Everything to them.

'Hey.'

But it was the voice she loved dearly.

'Hey.'

Rudy looked like he might smile, his mouth balancing on the edge of a small grin, but he refrained, and stepped forward.

'There's a bath ready for you,' he said.

She looked up at him, then down at her hands, which were painted with dried blood. She looked more closely; she hadn't noticed her crimson fingers. Her breath caught in her throat in fear, as she tried to discern a source of the blood.

Suddenly, Rudy stood there, right in front of her. He took her hands in his, and pulled her to her feet.

'Come on,' he said gently.

He helped her out of the bedroom as she stumbled along. They reached the hallway after ragged progress, and he led her into the bathroom. Her blood had been cleaned from the tiles. The glass shards had disappeared. Aside from the lack of a mirror above the sink, there was no evidence to suggest that she had ever been in there.

He closed the door, and began to carefully and silently tug clothing off her. She stood, in a soft, sad silence, as Rudy removed layer after layer, tossing each garment to the floor where they lay despondently. Minutes drifted by as she was slowly and sweetly taken apart, a look of deep concentration on Rudy's face that she wanted to lean forward and kiss.

Soon, she stood naked before him, the marks exposed and vulnerable, and she trembled a little, as her legs began to give way. He took her hand and helped her into the tub of warm water. Her skin stung a little as she sank down through the glassy surface, a long breath she didn't know she's been holding in was released slowly from her parted lips.

Rudy picked up a washcloth and began wiping the red stains from each finger. She watched in silence as he cleaned the cuts on her palms, her wrists, and her forearms. The cloth then travelled up to her face, where he carefully dabbed at her slashed cheek. There were more scars than she thought as he cleaned each in turn.

A wince was caught in her lungs as he passed over one that rested at her hairline. He leaned forward and kissed it, and her eyes slid closed. Blood twisted and contorted in the liquid, blooming like flowers. She twirled a wisp of it around her finger and it melted away. The water was an odd, cloudy pink colour.

Her eyes came up to meet his and there was so much tenderness visible beneath the surface of the icy blue pools that she reached one hand up to touch his face. He kissed her damp fingers, one by one.

Then he stood up, and helped her struggle to her feet. She clutched onto his forearms as she climbed out of the bath tub. She stood, unsteady on her feet, as her skin dripped. Rudy picked up a towel, and began to dry her off. He ran the towel through her hair, then across her neck, then her shoulders, then each arm. She yelped in pain as the rough material grazed over the bumps and crevices of her scars.

'Sorry,' he mumbled sheepishly.

Liesel did not reply; her fingers had once again slid down to her bump, the ghosting of a child that was once there, proof of her emptiness. Her eyes shut to contain the tears that threatened to spill. She felt another pair of hands cover her own, and she looked up to see Rudy gazing down at her swollen belly, his eyes watery. Another frosty pang of sadness wove through her ribs, clenching her insides.

'I lost her, Rudy,' she whispered. 'I lost her.'

A sob was released from behind her teeth, and she buried her face in her hands. Tears seeped through her fingers, dripping onto the floor. Her weeping painted the walls, as he continued to dry her skin. She felt Rudy wrap the towel around her torso, then she had the vague sensation of being lifted up, and carried like a child. She curved into his neck, as he took her away from the bathroom, through the darkened hallway, and back into the bedroom.

He sat her down at the centre of the bed where she curled up once again, her metallic gaze forever unconsciously seeking a piece of sky. It was dark outside, like someone had spilled a bottle of thick, dark blue ink across a page of rain. The clouds had cleared, drifted away like forgotten words, and had left a scattering of stars exposed in their wake.

A beautiful day to live. A beautiful day to die.

Liesel felt Rudy's arms wrap around her from behind as he cradled her, his chin resting on her shoulder, and the tears fell silently from between her eyelids. She was too exhausted to cry; her body did the work for her.

'I lost her,' she murmured, her eyes filled with the warm dark sky.

'I know,' he said simply, pressing his lips to her neck.

'Why did I lose her?' The question stung the air, filled it, reached to the very corners of the room. And there were no answers.

'These things happen, Liesel,' he replied quietly. 'We can always try again.'

'But what if I can't?' She turned to face him, her dangerous brown gaze demanding, her hoarse voice was bitten by passion. 'What if this has fucked me up and I can't conceive anymore?'

His hands crept up and held her face. 'I'll love you anyway, saumensch.'

'Oh Rudy,' she said softly.

He leaned forward and caught her lips between his own. Her fingers rose and wound into his lemon hair - the first thing she caught sight of when he re-emerged, clothed in December, from the black marble oblivion of the river. He still tasted remarkably of Rudy Steiner, that idiot boy who would paint himself for the glory of impersonating a black man. She could still find a hint of some forgotten triumph, a shard of dusty victory stuck to his lips. He tasted of apples.

He pulled away achingly softly, and pulled her down with him into the bed, where they lay side by side, facing each other. Her hands sought his own, somewhere among the tangled duvet, and clung on. In the end though, several inches apart was a little too much, and Rudy pulled her against him and wrapped his arms around her. She could feel his slow breathing against her neck. She tucked into his throat, and laid a small kiss there.

Sleep came to fetch them eventually, filling them with deliciously sweet release, a warm, black oblivion wrapping round them like a blanket. And Liesel tumbled into a hazy dream where she played with her _all_ of her children. All three of them, squealing and laughing and running with abandon.

Even her youngest daughter. Her beautiful baby girl with dangerous, rusty eyes.

* * *

**A/N: So yeah... Pretty angsty right? What inspired me to write this stuff, I'll never know, but now that it's done, tah dah.**

**I never intended it to be this long, so you know. But I'm pretty proud of this so please leave a review and tell me what you think. Thanks for reading!**

**(By the way, I'll probably be changing the rating to M soon, due to language and themes. And also the fact there is a smut chapter ready to post at some point. Just so you know.)**


	8. Bouquet

**A/N: Hey guys. Thank you FandomThief for the suggestion of a wedding (I know it was a while ago but it was bound to happen sooner or later). I hope you like it.**

**Enjoy.**

* * *

***April 8th, 1949***

**The day Meminger officially became Steiner.**

**But it wasn't necessarily the first time.**

The evening sky was a bouquet of white, billowing roses.

It was an ugly sky, a beautifully intricate scattering of grey, polluted petals. Ribbons of pale silver looped across the blank canvas. Excessively delicate. Ridiculously extravagant. Ironically reminiscent of the gathering of wild flowers woven in between Liesel's fingers as she looked up at her wedding day sky.

It had stretched across the hours, colourless and sweet like fondant icing. It had kissed her eyes from the brush of dawn, eating up the seconds painfully quickly in the hopes of pleasing. But she wanted this day to last as long as she could cling on to it, let the white swallow her up. White everywhere. White everywhere.

I'm not personally a fan of white - but that's a different story.

It was almost like a gift of sorts - a peace offering. A plea for forgiveness from a once corrupted, now redeemed planet. The world was lifting the white flag to her lips, cleaning the blood from her shattered teeth, apologising for the bruises, the scars and the general repeated punches to the gut that it had so gleefully inflicted years before. She let it, a dull, throbbing mutiny weaving in her veins and beating in her chest as it caressed her cheek and crooned sympathies in its tuneless, rustling voice. She let it because she needed it as her ally.

Friend? By no means. The world had given up the concept of friendship when it plucked her loved ones from her as carelessly as the rose petals that littered the sky above her. But ally? Yes, she could be persuaded to allow it that.

And so this sky, this wonderful, hideously treacherous sky, had given her away, led her down the aisle, painted the world white just for her, as she married her best friend.

She sat in a small pool of leaf bones, her first - and most likely last - pair of high heels discarded a few feet away from her bare feet, laid incriminstingly on their side like corpses. Her dress lay spread around her, mingling with the earth, imprinting the material with her footsteps from many years of wanderings, escapes, and kisses. Her metallic gaze drifted from the skies to shimmering, tin foil river, where Rudy, her husband of four and a half hours, stood, one quarter submerged in pearly white reflected clouds, throwing stones into the silver oblivion like the overgrown child he was.

The hem of his suit trousers were rolled up to his shins, his bare feet hidden by layers of still water. His jacket and tie were discarded somewhere up the bank, leaving him in his white shirt. Liesel watched him affectionately, was even tempted to join him, but chances of Ilsa Hermann hacking her fingers off with a bread knife if she got the dress wet were fairly high, so she refrained.

The silence that filled the air was sweet, wonderfully content. It stirred the water, it drew the long calm exhales from her sleepy lungs. It lit up his lemon hair in the half light. Liesel loved the silence, just as much as she loved the words. It wrapped them up and kept them. Such a beautiful evening it was.

It had been a day of promises and apologies and hands. As the quiet, grey stone of the small church at the end of the road enclosed her, she was passed from hand to hand: from Ilsa's gentle but stern administrations to her hair that morning (a stunning concoction of curls and twists that were currently rapidly unravelling by the minute), to Max's steady grip on her trembling fingers as he walked her down the narrow aisle, and finally, Rudy's tender touch as he slid the ring on her finger, a look of such concentration on his face that she was tempted to laugh. Rust met ice as the grey man droned on monotonously and Liesel and Rudy found themselves suppressing giggles, the sense that they were playing house rather than actually getting married overwhelmingly present.

They had escaped their own reception a while ago. The Bürgermeister had invited a small collection of people to their home for alcohol and food, and half of this small collection of people Liesel did not know, and were, quite frankly, painfully dull. Most of them were definitely old ex-Nazi officers, lumbering around with healthy doses of whiskey, and Liesel found herself wondering idly if her reception had coincided with an official reunion or the Mayor simply enjoyed spending time with his old Fürher friends that much.

Herr Steiner was there, smiling courteously at the guests, though she could tell he wanted to go home to bed - he was getting on a little in years. Max was also present, standing awkwardly in the corner, a tall sack of jutting bones that no one quite knew what to do with.

'You can go if you really want,' Liesel murmured to him as another uniformed gentleman threw him an odd look.

'And miss out on all this blatant discrimination of my religion? Hell no,' Max replied brightly.

'Very funny. Now go home,' she ordered sternly.

Max smiled affectionately down at her. 'You always were rather terrifying.'

'And you know well that I can be more terrifying,' she said levelly. 'Now go home.'

'Won't you miss me?' he asked.

'Don't worry about me. I'm taking my husband and getting out of here as soon as I can.'

They both looked across the room at Rudy, who was trapped in a conversation with an elderly man. He seemed to be determined to recount the entire history of Algerian fauna to Rudy, who looked like he would have happily dived out of the window at that very moment.

'I should probably get him out of here before he shoots himself,' Liesel said thoughtfully.

'Good plan,' he conceded. 'Take good care of that boy. He adores you.'

'I know,' she smiled.

'Well, it's getting late, and I suddenly feel rather ill,' Max said in mock concern. 'How terrible. I suppose I'll just _have_ to go home.'

'Yes Herr Vanderburg, I think it is essential that you go home and rest,' she said authoritatively.

'Well, if you insist,' he shrugged. He gave her a swift kiss to her forehead and murmured, 'Congratulations sister.' Then he stepped back from the room and quickly exited.

Her eyes drifted back over to where Rudy stood and watched him as he painstakingly extracted himself from the man, excuses spilling hurriedly from his mouth, and she stifled a laugh.

He came rushing over to her, his arm gripping her elbow. 'Get me out of here?' he pleaded.

'With pleasure,' she replied, pulling him out the room. In the hallway, she turned to him. 'Go wait outside, I'm going to talk to Frau Hermann.'

He nodded and walked out the front door just a little too quickly to be polite. She rolled her eyes and headed across the hall to the library. The door slid open at a push and she could taste the delicate slice of dust and paper that greeted her. She entered the room, suddenly swallowed by wonderful, soft silence.

Ilsa looked up from her book and smiled. 'You're leaving.'

No matter how long she spent with Ilsa Hermann, the woman always seemed to find a way to steal the words from Liesel's mouth. Just like now.

'I- uh-' she spluttered, completely at a loss.

The silver haired woman let out a laugh. 'It's okay, Liesel. I know that this hasn't exactly been _your_ party. My husband does like his meetings.'

'Oh,' she said, shifting awkwardly. 'Now that you mention it-'

'Go on, off you go. Have some fun,' Ilsa smiled complacently at her. 'Enjoy married life.'

'Thank you,' Liesel said humbly. She opened the door, throwing a last grateful glance at Ilsa, then retreated from the house.

Rudy was waiting obediently by the spot where The Whistler had been laid. He grinned his smirking grin, the one that looked exactly the same at twenty that it did at ten, and took her hand. She pulled off her painful high heels so that she was barefoot. And then they were running.

Even after all these years, even after so many life shattering events, it always seemed to come back to them running. It always came back to the raw ache in their lungs, the pounding of their drumming feet, the thrumming of their heartbeat mixed with the wind. Always, always running, just like when they were children. Just like when they were eighteen and running from their grief - but again, that's a different story.

They reached the Amper River, clutching their throbbing ribs, laughter spilling from their breathless lips. She had fallen down into the earth, her chest heaving, as she tossed aside the shoes that resided in clenched fists. He had kicked his shoes off, tugging off his jacket and tie and bounding into the water. She wasn't quite clear why, but she didn't question it as she let her breathing slow down.

Now they were here, letting the minutes slip by in a soft cloud of bliss. Letting the sky bloom and unfurl, her bouquet of roses.

'What are you thinking about?' The words fell from her lips, slipping through the cool air to the leaf-strewn earth.

There was a contemplative pause. 'I'm thinking...that I'm cold.'

'Oh wow,' she said. 'Very insightful.'

Rudy grinned sheepishly in reply, stepping out of the water and shaking his feet off. He walked up the bank and sat down beside her on the ground.

'What else are you thinking, Jesse Owens?' she asked, resting her head on his shoulder.

'Why so philosophical all of a sudden?' he smiled down at her, wrapping an arm round her shoulder.

'Why don't you just answer the question saukerl?' she replied. 'What are you thinking?'

She wasn't quite sure what she was expecting. Maybe a sexual joke or something. There were entire worlds in her mind constructed from Rudy's words, mostly built from swearing and insulting terms of endearment. But she did not foresee the words that grappled the air, released from the edge of his tongue.

'I'm thinking that it was different than the last time.'

Oh.

***September 14th, 1943***

**Twenty three days before Himmel died.**

**The first wedding of Jesse Owens and his Book Thief.**

The wailing sirens sang through the evening, ripping the darkening sky in two. The world was filled with sound, a harsh, terrifying sound that could make the strongest of souls shiver in remembrance. The sky was shattered, the peace impertinently interrupted like a screaming child. The air raid was earlier than expected, dragging the agitated, buzzing insects from their homes as they swarmed into a neighbour's hive. The basements were filling.

Two out of three of 33 Himmel Street - the third seemingly missing - came hurrying out of the house. A man with molten silver eyes and a woman made of cardboard. They stepped out into the dusk and heading towards the end of the street, where the the neighbours were clumped like cement. They looked around agitatedly for the third, the daughter, out a little bit later than she had promised. The man knew the third was out with her best friend, and hoped to God that they would return soon.

The square woman, like a wardrobe on legs, with a pile of elastic on her head was complaining loudly at the lack of her daughter's presence. Though she buried it beneath several threats to knock the girl into next week, there was fear weaving through her ribs, impaling her heart._ Where was that saumensch?_

_'_Where is she?' the woman demanded of her husband.

'I don't know, dear,' he replied simply, 'But she's a smart girl. She'll know to get under cover.'

'I bet she's with that Steiner boy!' she yelled. 'If I get my hands on that dummkopf, I'll-'

But her sentence was drowned in a sea of keening cries from the siren's angry metal teeth. They shuffled down into the neighbour's basement, throwing a last anxious glance around the grey, sleepy houses. Then the doors shut.

And somewhere near the outskirts of Molching, two fourteen year olds ran for their life down the road, swearing loudly as they sprinted for home.

'Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.' Rudy's curses barely marked the surface of the siren's screams.

It always comes back to running. Burning lungs and pounding feet and the tuneless whispers of the wind.

Liesel's breath scraped through her lungs like barbed wire, tearing up her chest. She could hear the high pitched winces issuing from her throat as she tried to keep her head from exploding, her heart from bleeding. They tore up the streets towards Himmel, hearing the sounds of frantic chattering depleting slowly in the night air. They were going to be left outside.

'We can still make it!' Rudy yelled, his voice engulfed by the wailing, and she hoped against hope that he was right. She heard a thump behind her, a loud, angry string of swear words, and she turned to see Rudy sprawled across the ground, struggling to get up.

'Goddamn it, Rudy!' she yelled.

She ran to his side to help him up. She dragged his arm over her shoulder and they stumbled onwards as quickly as they could on three and a half feet.

They staggered onto Himmel, Rudy moving at half his regular speed due to the icy sharp pain slicing through his ankle like glass. Then Liesel halted at the centre of the street, Rudy nearly falling over at the sudden stop. They're eyes darted round in panic: the entire street was clear. Everyone was down in the Fiedler's basement.

'Fuck,' she murmured as the siren stopped crying. There was a resounding silence, eerily creeping through their bones and gripping their thumping hearts.

'Fuck,' Rudy agreed.

'What do we do?' Liesel whispered, as if the bombs would somehow hear her voice and come for them.

'Maybe my house is unlocked. We could go into my basement,' he replied, his voice trembling a little.

The muffled, far sound of a plane's heartbeat meeting the earth rumbled through the ground, making the two freeze up where they were. They turned in dread to the source of the sound, but saw nothing in the darkness.

'Come on,' he murmured, limping across to his house. She followed behind, gazing at the sky in fear. There was a smattering of stars looking thoughtfully down at her. 'Liesel!' she snapped to attention, finding Rudy sliding the window open.

_Just another theft. Just another theft._

Her thoughts bit at the corners of her mind as Rudy gave her a leg up through the front window. Moments later, Rudy dragged himself up and into the kitchen, where they crouched in complete darkness. Another heartbeat echoed through the skies, sending a tremor through the house, and her hand found his in the black oblivion.

'We need to get down to the basement,' he whispered, and she nodded, though she knew he couldn't see her.

And suddenly, he was tugging her through the blindness, towards an unknown destination. Darkness painted her eyes. Nothing existed except her breathing, and Rudy's warm, shaking grip on her. Several times, she felt him stumble in front of her, his winces cutting through the black, and she would stumble with him, sometimes catching a leg or an arm or a rib in her flailing hand.

Her feet met nothing, as suddenly she was maneuvered through a door and down a set of stairs. Fat raindrop bombs were hitting the ground somewhere nearby: she could feel the vibrations brushing down her spinal chord like ice.

Then his hand left hers, and she was swallowed by the nothing, the darkness capturing her and holding her in its vice like grip.

'Rudy?' she whispered desperately, turning her head wildly to find some kind of sight of him: there was none. 'Rudy, come back.'

Suddenly, her eyes blazed with light and she found herself face to face with Rudy, holding a rusty old lantern. He grinned.

'Hey.'

Liesel gave him a swift slap round the head. 'Idiot.'

Another raindrop hit the ground, like a far off footsteps. Their breathing slowed right down as they eyes drifted fearfully to the ceiling. She backed slowly into the corner, sinking down on some dusty sheets that spread across the cement floor. Her knees came up to her chest as she huddled against the frost biting at her skin. Rudy painstakingly lowered himself down onto a paint tin across from her. A shudder sliced through her system as another bomb met its mark and she curled up tighter, her breath twisting and curling in the air before her.

'You're cold?' he asked.

'A little,' she said, a touch defensively.

There was a split second of thought, then Rudy pushed himself off the paint tin and crawled across to her, his bad ankle dragging like a chain behind him, joining her where she sat. His arms wove around her, pulling her head into his shoulder. They stayed, two scared children, unbearably small in a cruel world, entwined with each other.

'Rudy?' her voice cracking through the thick, cold silence like stone.

'Yeah?'

'Are you afraid of dying?'

***One Small Fact***

**I have heard that question asked so many times.**

**And no matter how many times I hear it,**

**I am always drawn to the answer.**

Liesel wondered if Rudy realised that his grip on her had seemingly tightened momentarily round her. She decided not to mention it.

She honestly didn't know why she asked. Maybe the fact that she knew Death stood so close, so close to where they stood, that another heartbeat from a plane's ribcage could be her last. Maybe she had always wanted to know, always harboured a hidden curiosity about something that she had been acquaintances with for a long time, but did not know quite well enough. Whatever the reason, it seemed Rudy had no answer prepared.

'What do you mean?' he said slowly.

'I mean just that.' She looked up at him, at the light from the lantern flickering in his deep blue eyes. 'Are you afraid of dying?'

There was a long, drawn out pause, stretching across the seconds like spider webs. Then Rudy looked down at her, his eyes crusted over with sobriety.

'If I was, would you say I was a coward?'

Liesel tilted her head upward and laid a small kiss at his throat, feeling the oxygen brush through his veins, feeling the life burning under his skin. 'No.'

'Then I'm terrified,' he said simply.

'So am I,' she said.

Liar.

Another pause bit down on their lips, halting sound and engulfing them. It was cold and she found herself burying deeper into the knot of limbs she had tied herself in, for some kind of warmth.

'Why do you think that is?' Rudy piped up thoughtfully.

'Why do I think what is?' she said in confusion.

'Death. Why are we afraid of death?' His voice was solemn, but she could hear the curiosity dripping to the cement floor like honey.

'I don't know,' she said, 'Maybe because we don't know what comes next.'

'Himmel and Hölle?' he suggested weakly.

'If you believe that,' she shrugged. 'But death is death. It's the end. That moment where all thoughts, all memories and all emotions just...stop.' Her eyes fell to her numb fingers and she studied them, the creases and contours and scabs from where she had picked at the loose skin. 'People are afraid of death because living is the only reality they know.'

'And the pain. That sounds fun,' Rudy smiled brightly.

Liesel laughed a little. 'Yeah, the pain is best bit.'

Another heartbeat blossoming in the distance, the sound of destruction, made them flinch a little as they huddled closer together. The warmth between them was sparse and barely distinguishable from the bitter cold of the basement, but it was just enough to prevent pneumonia or something similar.

'So do you think we're going to die?' she asked. Her face was impassive, as she had trained it to be, but the words were soaked in fear, the hope that he would reassure her. She didn't want to die here, in a coffin made of cement and dust. And she wouldn't die here. But then, humans have a remarkable capacity to develop perfectly feasible phobias and build them to ridiculous heights. Everyone is afraid of me in some form or other. Everyone.

'I don't know,' he said, uncertainty grappling his teeth. 'If we die, we die. Just like you said.'

'Goddamn it,' she murmured.

He grinned at her through the half-light. 'Was that not the right answer?'

'No,' she said sulkily. 'Wrong answer.'

'Sorry,' he said sheepishly.

They collapsed back into a considerably warmer silence, one that wrapped them up like butter. The raindrop bombs were growing more distant, but Liesel honestly didn't have much experience in trying to discern the distance of a bomb, so tried not to feel relieved.

'Liesel?'

'Yes?'

'Let's get married.'

Silence. Silence and the smoky flowers blooming from Liesel's lips.

'Rudy, was that a _proposal?_'

'Maybe.'

'Jesus, Rudy. There's a time and place,' she said.

'I know. That's my point,' he said, as if it were obvious.

'What, you think _now_ is the time and place?' she asked incredulously.

'Well why not?'

'Oh,' she said, in mock thought, 'Well maybe the fact that we're fourteen years old. We don't have a ring. There doesn't _seem_ to be a priest anywhere nearby. And oh yes, _it's raining bombs right now._'

There was a long pause in which Rudy seemed to absorb this. Then he said slowly, 'I see your point.'

'Good. I'm glad,' she replied, satisfied.

'But that's why we should get married,' Rudy continued thoughtfully, as if there hadn't been an interruption. 'It's raining bombs. We could be dead in minutes. Why the hell not?'

A sigh of mingled exasperation and affection was cast from her throat. 'Rudy, I- I don't even know what to say to that.'

'Admit it,' he smirked. 'You'd just _love_ me to be your husband.'

Liesel disregarded this with an irritated flick of the head. 'We're _fourteen_, Rudy.'

'Yes, and we may well be dead at fourteen. Just give me this, please?' His tone had grown endearingly pleading, and she gazed up at his face, childish and sweet, and tried not to smile. Unhelpfully, another bomb chose to send a shiver through the house, sounding dangerously close, and she unconsciously crept closer to him.

'Okay,' she murmured, gloriously defeated.

A grin spread like wings on his face, and the smile burst from her lips, unrestrained and golden.

Liesel was struck with a sudden thought. 'How exactly do you get married?'

Rudy looked down at her in surprise. 'You don't know?'

'I've never been to a wedding,' she shrugged.

'It's easy. You just stay quiet, then say 'I do' when you need to.'

'That's it?' she said in disbelief. 'Then what's all the fuss about?'

'I don't know. I'm not a grown up, am I? Anyway-' he cleared his throat loudly, and then drawled in low, grey voice, 'We are gathered here today to-'

'What are you doing?' she laughed.

'The sermon,' he said, 'Now shut up. You're ruining my speech.'

'Sorry.'

'We are gathered here today to celebrate the...uh- _joining - _yeah, that sounds right - the joining of Liesel and Rudy. Does anyone have any reason why they should not be wed?'

He looked around the empty basement, to a resounding silence. 'I damn well thought so,' he said decidedly.

'Anyway,' he continued authoritatively, 'we begin the marriage vows.' He turned to Liesel and took her hand. 'Do you, saumensch, take-'

'Rudy,' she said, 'If you're going to do this, do it properly.'

'Okay, fine. Do you, _Miss _Saumensch, take Mr. Saukerl to be your husband guy?' He leaned towards her and said in a stage whisper, 'This is where you say I do.'

'Uh, I do?' she said weakly.

'Christ, you sound so happy,' he said, and she cuffed him round the back of the head.

'I do,' she repeated firmly, her voice echoing against the walls. 'I do.'

Rudy smiled. 'I do too,' he murmured softly. 'And with the power invested in me, I now pronounce us husband and wife. You may now kiss the bride.'

And then he was kissing her. And she was kissing him, her lips caught between his own, her smile mingling with his. He kissed the smoky flowers from her mouth, the shards of fear and dust, each one devoured by her wonderful best friend. He tasted of frost and cement and a day spent in the grass by the Amper River, an odd and sweet mixture. And it was so soft, a ghost of a kiss that she felt the frustration build up in her chest.

His cold hands held her face, tangling in the wisps of loose hair and pulling her closer. Her numb, trembling fingers found their way into his lemon hair as she moved onto his lap and straddled him, winding her arms around his neck and kissing the corners of his mouth. His lips parted and a sound trapped halfway between a surprised gasp and a lustful moan escaped against her own lips as his arms wrapped round her waist, pulling her into his chest.

Another broken heartbeat dragged through the sky, and they broke apart, breathing heavily and looking to the ceiling in fear. There was nothing but silence, suffocating, cement silence. And then another pulsing heartbeat in the distance.

Liesel slid off Rudy's lap slowly, lucidity blooming in her rusty brown eyes, and she curled up beside him, trying to keep herself from trembling with longing. His arm wrapped around her once again, hugging her close. They sat in a dazed, distorted silence, not quite knowing what to say, trying to forget the warm, fuzzy sensation gripping at their insides.

'Do you think we're going to die?' she whispered into his shoulder.

'I don't know,' he said. His eyes drifted over to meet hers. 'But at least I can die happy now.'

There were no words buried in her vast, forever evolving index of vocabulary that she absorbed from her books that she could think to respond with. She wanted to tell him that she loved him, so very much, but somehow, she knew it would sound quite as genuine as she would want it to. So instead, other words came.

'Rudy, if you die on me, I will personally castrate you.'

'Fair enough.'

They laughed, a cold, sweet sound bounding off the walls and scattering across the floor. She settled into his chest, her eyelids growing heavy as the light of the lantern growing fainter, the darkness creeping in. She felt herself being laid down on the ground, the dusty sheet beneath her being dragged over her like a blanket. Then she felt Rudy lay alongside her, holding her close so that his chin rested upon her shoulder.

Sleep drifted in like a flurry of snow, burying her in makeshift oblivion, and she fell into troubled dreams, rocked to sleep by his slow breathing on her neck and the raindrop bombs.

***The Story Of Liesel And ****Rudy Steiner***

**Two weddings.**

**One in a stone church under a sky of roses.**

**One in a coffin of cement while it rained bombs.**

**Which one was the real one?**

'Do you think we did it in the wrong order?' Rudy said thoughtfully.

The roses were scattering to a blue tinged dusk. Her eyes were painted with the petals. 'What do you mean?'

'We got married at fourteen. Consummated it at eighteen. Got engaged a few months ago. And now we're married again,' he said. 'Wrong order.'

'Our lives have never been in the right order,' Liesel pointed out. 'Who loses their entire family by the time their fifteen? Besides, it wasn't like the one in the basement was real.'

He smiled at her, his wonderful best friend a bride for the second time. 'It was real enough, Mrs. Saumensch.'

She grinned. 'Yes. I guess it was, Mr. Saukerl.'

He leaned over and kissed her forehead. 'Can we go home now?'

'You're tired?' she asked incredulously.

There was a grin stuck to the corners of his mouth. 'Nope.'

Understanding unfurled in her eyes like a storm. She rolled her eyes and sighed in defeat - glorious, glorious defeat. 'If you insist.'

Rudy pushed himself to his feet, retrieving his discarded clothes from the muddy ground. Liesel gathered her skirts about her and got up slowly, shaking off the needle sharp disuse in her bare feet.

The sky was a bouquet of white, billowing roses, a wedding gift, an apology, as Mr. Saukerl and Mrs. Saumensch departed from the pearl river, fingers entwined.

***April 8th, 1949***

**The day Meminger officially became Steiner.**

**But it wasn't necessarily the first time.**

* * *

**A/N: Again, thank you FandomThief for the chapter inspiration (I know it's sort of late, sorry). I love hearing from you wonderful people and feedback is always appreciated. So if you have any requests or ideas, let me know.**

**Sorry for the long wait. School is being school and that never really helps matters at all. I know it's not my best work, but yeah. Hope you liked the chapter and please leave a review. **


	9. Forget

**A/N: So here you go. Your M rated chapter. It's my first attempt at an M rated piece so I'm pretty damn nervous. But I think we all need a little bit of LieselxRudy smut in our lives, don't you?**

**It's not going to be very graphic, but I guess I'll see how it goes.**

* * *

It was a day that wore a silky, grey gown of morning, clothed in harsh, disinfectant sunlight beaming down on the shimmering, silver concrete laid out below it. Large, curling wisps of cloud bloomed and billowed, reaching towards the sky like the remnants of a smoker's cement lungs.

The constant murmur of far off gossip returned like the rustling of leaf carcasses on the Autumn ground, as it normally did on the start of each day; the small world that was Molching was awake, and crawling with life.

It was one of those mornings that resemble a twisted and - quite frankly - painfully boring limbo, each second identical to the one prior. Another moment of paper white sky; another moment of mindless marching to a grey, crumbling brick oblivion. One hour was much the same as the others, bleeding into each other at a leisurely pace like the dull raindrop veins on the smoky glass.

***October 8th, 1947**

**Four years and a day.**

The pale curtains glowed like sun-struck eyes, glaring sleepily through cheap, industrial cotton eyelids. The room was warm and illuminated in the soft, milky half-light, giving the walls the odd and slightly ironic appearance of a blush.

It was to this symphony of indistinguishable, buzzing voices and the spluttering, throaty cough of motor engines that the Book Thief awoke.

Liesel's eyes slid open a little, peering wearily at the stream of daylight that seeped through the dragging strokes of her eyelashes. A long, impatient sigh was drawn from behind her teeth as she burrowed further under the duvet, burying herself in Germany's finest, institutional sheets. Thin, makeshift sleep crumpled over in layers, like a slab of fabric, enfolding her in a stuffy, uncomfortable embrace of sorts.

Liesel Meminger had never necessarily been a morning person.

You would have thought that she would have noticed something wasn't quite how it was supposed to be. She was an intelligent woman, perceptive, with the eyes of a thief. But it was either the unwillingness to wake up or the remains of the whiskey consumed the night before that fogged up her head like the concrete clouds outside.

There were many hints available to select from. Far too many. It was like a trail of breadcrumbs, fragments of the events beforehand. They would peek up from the corners of her peripheral vision (if she could be bothered to open her damn eyes), dancing at the edge of her unsteady mind like the folds at the edge of a page. If counted on fingers, the telltale signs would add up to a grand total of seven.

Some of them were hidden; some were glaringly obvious, laid languidly out among the scraped teeth of the dark floorboards and chipped skirting board.

There were seven standout hints to choose from.

And yet, oddly enough, Liesel discovered the insignificant, all-but-invisible eighth hint. The one she wasn't supposed to think about at the dawn of a surprising revelation. The one that anyone else wouldn't have noticed.

Then again, Liesel Meminger had never necessarily been a morning person.

As she shifted a little in her slumber, she felt an uncomfortable jab in her side through the thin quilt of the mattress. It was an impertinent prod from non other than a thick, iron spring, poking up like a bird through the branches of a tree.

That was the first alarm bell, sounding in her head.

One eye cracked opened in confusion. Never, ever in her many years sleeping at 18 Grande Strasse had mattress springs ever interrupted her sleep. Her bed was created from high-quality, goose-feather, no-springs-guaranteed goodness and this was not it.

This is the first thing she noticed. Well done, Liesel. Well done.

The seven signs followed somewhat in order after that.

Liesel pushed herself up on her elbows, rubbing her eyes with her palm. The duvet slipped from her head, revealing the room she resided in. The features of the room began to emerge in more clarity. Her eyes stung a little at corridor of light reaching through the slice in the curtains.

The first sign struck home when she noticed a corner of wooden floorboards. In her room, her floor was composed from a rich, finely embroidered rug that was a little too large for the room, and acted simply as a surrogate carpet, which - she noted - was currently absent from her view.

Two: there was a significant lack of a bookshelf, much less any actual books. That was the second warning sign that this was not her room (if that wasn't a warning sign, then I don't know what is).

Three: the air didn't taste of regality and passed-from-generation-to-generation dust, like she was now accustomed to. It tasted of cheap, newly plastered paint and the familiarly unfamiliar homely scent of dried sweat. Whose sweat, she did not quite know, so she naturally assumed it belonged to her.

Four: an empty whiskey bottle lay despondently on its side, mournfully dripping a small stream of gold like droplets of blood. Alcohol of any kind was strictly prohibited from the top floor of the Bürgermeister's home. This rule had been solidly set in place after a certain incident - a year since the bombing, at the age of fifteen, Liesel had gradually and systematically drank an entire bottle of champagne that she had stolen from the mayor's kitchen, in remembrance of her Papa. They had found her passed out on the floor of her bedroom, clutching shards of the shattered empty bottle in her bleeding, tearstained hands.

Five and six came along in such a jumble of confusion and fear, they were almost indistinguishable, hitting like a punch to the gut. Her clothes were spread across the floor like marionettes with their strings cut, seemingly tossed there in a hurry. They lay there incriminatingly, glaring resentfully up at her like murder victims. The remains, the carcasses of last night.

It was then that with a jolt, she became aware that she was wearing nothing. She was completely naked beneath the duvet. Suddenly, the sheets she had tangled herself in seemed impossibly thin, impossibly, unacceptably uncovering. Panic ate away at her bare skin like the heat that had suddenly gripped her body as she scrambled to cover herself.

Those were the first six signs. The seventh came next. The one that could have cancelled out all else, if she had bothered to pay any sort of attention.

Liesel glanced over beside her and was both astonished and awed to find Rudy Steiner fast asleep. Also completely naked.

It was that moment when her heartbeat just stopped for a second or two. She honestly hadn't been expecting this. Why she hadn't noticed his presence to begin with is completely beyond me, because it's the type of thing someone would realise first off.

Then it hit her. Everything that had happened the night before came rushing back like a hurricane, making the light, little butterflies in her belly awaken. They seemed to be eating her insides up.

She remembered why she was here.

What she had done.

Oh.

_Oh._

Shit.

***October 7th, 1947***

**Four years.**

**The night before.**

Four years.

This week of the year had always been the most difficult. Of all weeks during the year, this one broke through their carefully crafted walls. It was one of those walls, built up from the rubble of their former lives, the remnants of their homes, the corpses of their childhood. It protected them from the worst of the storm.

It was a shelter of sorts, thrown together beneath their ribcages, enclosing their torn and battered hearts. It smothered every artery, every vein, like cement, corrupting her yet numbing her to the extremities of her grief. She didn't want it to be like that. But in the end, blunting her emotions was a small price to pay for it not hurting. It didn't hurt as much any more. It only hurts a little now.

After that incident with the Whistler so many years ago, Liesel had made a resolution not lose control of her emotions again. It was too much for her, too high a cost. And she didn't want to put that kind of strain on Rudy, if she could help it.

Rudy had seemingly went along with this resolution, taking it in his stride and moulding it to himself. Truthfully, he needed just as much help as she did. The image of his mother's body being carried away was the stuff of nightmares, biting at the corners of his mind ever since. It couldn't be dulled by time. But it could be oppressed.

Four years.

They survived the next four years in a somewhat peaceful oblivion, dutifully shoving away any thoughts that could potentially break them down. But it was always the same when that day came around, an anniversary of sorts, a birthday for destruction. Another year since the heartbeats of a plane's ribcage rained down upon them like snow.

It was this date that the walls would be picked apart, their shelters slowly and lagouriously destroyed, until they were bare and wildly vulnerable, open to be damaged. It was always the same. Always the damn same.

This year had found Liesel curled up by Rudy's front door, having staggered over to Herr Steiner's shop from the Bürgermeister's house. Herr Steiner, rather predictably, was out of town - he always was at this time of year - yet Rudy had stayed home. A 'closed' sign that hung neatly in the door stared down at the shaking woman that desecrated its territory.

It was relatively early evening when Rudy finally came home, finding her trembling on his doorstep.

'Hey, saumensch,' he said simply. He wasn't surprised as such. After all, it was always the same.

Liesel looked up at him through wide eyes. 'Hey, saukerl,' she murmured.

He had sat down on the doorstep beside her, apparently not caring about the passing glances of his neighbours. His arm automatically wove round her shoulders, pulling her into his neck. This always seemed to calm her down a little. That boy's neck works wonders for her. It's really quite fascinating.

He didn't need to ask what was wrong. Instead, he went directly for the next, most important question. 'How are you doing?'

'Oh I'm having a smashing time,' she spat out bitterly.

'Really? I thought it was just me.' A small laugh fell from her lips, as easily as rain, and she burrowed further into his neck.

'Aren't these things supposed to get easier with time?' she mumbled.

'Supposedly,' Rudy sighed. 'But I'd just _love_ to punch the bastard that said that.'

'Agreed.'

They lapsed into a soft, comfortable silence that wrapped her up like a blanket. It was those silences that she longed for. Not the cold, empty ones that she faced alone; the ones she shared with her best friend, ones of peace and mingled breath and that content feeling she got when nothing needed to be said.

'Let's go somewhere,' Rudy piped up suddenly. The proposition hung in the air like a bird in flight, then flit away, the words scattering against the pavement.

'Sure,' she said. 'Where?'

'The river,' he replied. She had looked up at him then, and had seen in his childish blue eyes that the river was the only place he wanted to go, and that was fine.

She had leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, said something vaguely along the lines of 'okay', and they stood up decidedly.

'Hang on,' Rudy said, as inspiration struck his features, and he disappeared into the two-bedroomed flat above the shop. She had glanced around absentmindedly and for some reason, wondered if the plump grey clouds that filled the sky like an ocean were as soft as they looked. It's these kind of side-notes that Liesel has an impressive talent for remembering.

***October 7th, 1947***

**Four years.**

Rudy reappeared, a mischievous glint blossoming in his eyes like a drop of ink in water, and Liesel was reminded with a jolt of the child he once was. The child she fell in love with.

He held up a small bottle of whiskey. 'All I could find.'

'No champagne?'

'Yeah right, saumensch. You're not going near champagne ever again,' he smirked, earning him a cuff around the head.

'Oh shut up. That was three years ago.'

'I heard you tried to pick a fight with your bookcase-'

'That's not true!' she gasped scandalised, cuffing him a second time.

'Come on, you old drunk, we're wasting precious alcohol time,' he dangled the bottle in her face, the gold liquid swirling around like a pretty tornado, and she slapped it away, but the corners of her mouth were curving into a heavily suppressed grin.

He leaned forward to capture it with his own, but she pulled away. 'Only if you win me in a race.'

'So I can't kiss you unless I win you in a race?' he asked incredulously.

'For the next five years,' she said solemnly.

Rudy looked at her, then looked down the road, then back to her. 'That kiss is mine, Meminger.'

'You wish, Steiner.'

They knelt down in the dusty road, shoulder to shoulder and swallowed by a sudden serious silence, buried deep under their fingernails as they dug into the gravel. There was no attempt to shatter through it. This was business. Serious business.

Or it would have been if she hadn't cheated.

Liesel had thrown several metres between her and Rudy before he had even realised what had happened. There were several more metres between them by the time he had stumbled to his feet. And then they were running.

It always comes down to running. Always.

She could remember the way the wind brushed past her face, as if it had somewhere it had to be. She could remember pushing her way through a heaving crowd of gales, murmuring tunelessly through tree branches. She could remember the pounding of her feet as they beat the ground like bullets; the euphoric sounding of alarms in her ears as her heartbeat scraped to a higher speed.

A laugh bubbled up in her throat, tearing through the thick, suffocating grief, and was released from her lips. It had mingled beautifully with the wind in her hair and the thrumming of her wild breathing. Somewhere behind her, there had been Rudy's breathless laugh sounding out against the wind.

She wanted to scream as elation - the exhilaration of experiencing life's small joys - and anguish - the despair of loss - battled out savagely in her belly, eating at her exhausted lungs and tugging at her veins. So she had laughed. And he had laughed. Because everything was fine.

They had both laughed. And she hoped to God that they would never stop.

***October 7th, 1947***

**Four years.**

**They could never forget.**

They had reached the river in a tumbled mess of hearts and bones and laughing, always, always laughing. Rudy, being highly superior at races, had caught up to her. They were neck a neck, struggling with each other like children in a brawl. As they reached the grassy banks, Liesel stumbled, dragging Rudy down with her.

The next thing Liesel knew, once she had opened her clenched shut eyes, was that Rudy was above her trying to steady his breathing and obviously suppress the laugh that was swelling up behind his teeth.

They caught each others eye, and his laughter spilled out over her, now unrestrained, and she relished it; it tasted so sweet in her lungs.

'I win,' he murmured, a confident smirk plastered to his face.

'As I recall, no one won,' she contradicted.

Regardless, he had already leaned in, had already pressed his mouth against hers. It could have been the remains of her earlier excitement, or longing to avoid any negativity. Or it could have been the odd, swelling heat building up in her belly. Whatever it was, she had found herself pushing herself up against him, kissing him back with enthusiasm.

But he had pulled away, pushed himself off her. Trying to shove away the disappointment that clouded her, she sat up, brushing the grass from her tangled, almost German hair.

'I still think I won,' she muttered.

'Believe it all you want, saumensch, it won't make it true.' He took a swig of the honey gold liquid. Liesel laughed as he pulled a contorted face. 'Ugh, it tastes like shit.'

'And you would know how that tastes, because?'

'Hey, I've eaten my fair share of shit.'

'Franz Deutscher?'

'How did you know?'

'Rudy, I was there when you were covered in the stuff.'

'Oh yeah.'

She had pulled the cuboid bottle from his grasp, 'You must be drinking it wrong.'

Then she had taken a gulp of it herself. Her throat had stung with fiery bites as the whiskey ran down it, catching in her chest. The rest was sent flying into the earth with her saliva as she spat it back out.

'You know,' she said thoughtfully, smacking her lips, 'It _does_ taste like shit.'

'Let me try it again,' he said, reaching for the bottle.

The next hour passed as a stubborn competition between Liesel and Rudy, attempting to outdo each other's attempts at keeping the stuff down. As the dark seeped into the pale evening sky, the whiskey disappeared centimetre by centimetre, another inch of putrid gold gone. The bottle was passed between the two, and they gulped it down. It was a dare of sorts, an unspoken challenge to test the boundaries they couldn't possibly have crossed any other day.

***October 7th, 1947***

**Four years.**

**She would make herself forget.**

As the evening drifted lazily into another frosty Autumn night, the taste of the alcohol lost its sting, even started to taste almost pleasant, in that perverse, bitter way. Before they knew it, the bottle was empty.

They weren't drunk as such, as it wasn't a large bottle. But the spirit had woven its way into their bloodstream, making them jollier than usual, and a lot more giggly. They had even ended up singing - yelling - the German national anthem, very poorly out of tune, because Liesel and Rudy had never necessarily been able to sing that well.

In retrospect, it was probably a stupid idea to drink half a bottle of whiskey. Liesel had been hoping to blunt her grief, and it had worked. Mostly. Though it was good for a distraction, it all but shattered that wall she had built up over the years, as honestly, alcohol was great for scratching away the protective surface, leaving old wounds revealed and vulnerable. She was liable for attack. It would have been simply too easy to break her down then.

Around nine (not that they had any way of telling the time), a steady pulse of rain began to fall, dripping down their necks and arms. In a buzz of exhilaration and over-sentimentality, they had run, laughing, forever laughing, away from the river, Liesel dragging the singing empty bottle through the air behind her.

They reached Rudy's front door, giggling like children, as the rain began to thicken, dribbling down their faces. That was how they stood for the next five minutes, desperately trying to delay the inevitable: the moment when Liesel would force herself to walk away, go home, and fall into another nightmare that would be waiting just for her.

***October 7th, 1947***

**Four years.**

**It would always come back.**

It wasn't long before the giggling stopped, and they looked at each other. Rudy gazed sadly down at her, always seemingly on the verge of saying something, anything, to prevent what was to come.

'Do I have to go?' she pleaded, the words slipping from her mouth before she could stop them.

Rudy said nothing, but simply looked at her tenderly, rain running down his face.

'Please,' she whispered, 'Help me forget.'

He gulped, and nodded, still unable to say anything. Instead, he reached forward, cupping her damp face in both hands, and kissed her.

'Stay with me,' he murmured into her lips.

She nodded numbly, kissing him back in desperation, her thin arms wrapping round his neck. Precipitation painted their skin, yet there they had stayed, locked in an embrace.

There was a movement beside her, and somehow the door was open - Rudy must have unlocked it - and suddenly, she was being backed into a wall, a door, something.

He was so close, pressing her up against the cool, white wallpaper of the hallway. She could remember the taste of the liquor on his warm breath, the raindrops on his lips. It was oddly delicious. She kissed each shard of rain off his mouth, relishing the feel of it. His tongue slid between her teeth, and she welcomed it gladly. That golden swelling in her belly had returned, burning at the knot of her stomach like a fire. His fingers gently dragged her damp, dark yellow hair over her shoulder as he pressed his lips softly against the newly bare, tender skin of her neck.

His hands had crept down from her face to her hips, lifting her up so that she was level with his intense, blue gaze. Her fingers tangled in his lemon hair as she pulled him closer, her legs wrapping round his waist. His mouth was travelling across her face, her forehead, her eyelids, her cheeks, anywhere he could reach was attended to by his lips. It felt glorious.

She could remember that vague sensation of being carried, seemingly up a flight of stairs if she was not mistaken. Then another door had opened, and for some reason, she had realised that she had been clutching the bottle entire time. It fell from her grasp and hit his bedroom floor with a musical thud.

Then another surface had come up to greet her: Rudy's bed. She was laid carefully down, seconds later joined by Rudy settling above her. Again, her fingers wove into his hair, pulling his lips down to hers. He kissed her with a hunger, grazing his teeth against her bottom lip in an odd, burning frustration and making her breath catch in her throat.

Liesel hadn't been sure what exactly was going on. Normally, she would have pushed away this behaviour as stupid hormonal lust. Something she needn't worry about because it hardly concerned her. It was true that every so often, she would lose herself in Rudy's embrace, but she would always be clear-headed enough to stop it before it had gotten too far.

But fear of loneliness had made her reckless. It had made her long for his touch. Powered by the burning, golden fizz of the alcohol in her chest, she was drunk on his love; she drowned in his kisses and knew that she had never wanted anything else. Nothing else existed to her in that moment. Only Rudy's lips, his rough, tender lips brushing across her throat.

She remembered at that point that she was pulled into a kneeling position opposite Rudy as he carefully began to tug off layers of her clothing. She had obliged, gently pulling off his own clothes. Slowly, steadily, they had systematically undressed each other in a soft, thoughtful silence; removed all that separated them, piece by piece, reaching over to touch or kiss another patch of bare skin that had been revealed for the first time. It was almost like mapping uncharted lands; Rudy was already taking mental notes of each bump or line of her body as he kissed each in turn. His fingers played each protruding rib from under her skin like piano keys.

She had tried to avoid looking at him. She was afraid what she'd find if she did. Somehow, the image of Rudy would always remain to her that smug, grinning boy who ran races in the street, that's how it always should be. And she assumed it was the same for him, for no matter what he discovered or exposed, his eyes always seemed to flit back to her face, that one dearly familiar feature of hers that he knew well in the wake of this new territory.

And she was worried what he would find. Bones jutted out from under her skin in odd places, having never really been able to overcome the malnourishment of her childhood. Her flesh was uneven, marked with the Führer's signature stamped all over her body. The long, thin scar snaking across the back of her neck from the bite of the parade day whip. The numerous brushes of grey from the bruises that never quite went away. The harsh but loving kisses of goodbye from Himmel as the rubble embraced her like a child. Her body was an imperfection, a blot on a page of words.

As the last few scraps of modesty were unravelled from her, as she became bare, her arms moved to cover herself, cover the imperfections. It wasn't something she had generally thought about, let alone worried about, but she had never expected to be in this situation. But there she was, wrapped in her best friend's arms as he slowly and sweetly took her apart. She didn't want him to see what was underneath. It would hurt too much.

She felt her arms being gently pulled away from her body. 'Don't,' she whispered pleadingly, her eyes clenched shut.

There was a moment of deafening silence. Then she felt him pull her close, bury his face in her neck and murmur into her skin, '_Schön_.'

Then his lips devoured her, kissed every inch of her that he could find, as if she were as sweet as vanilla, as if she were as complete and whole and pure and utterly wonderful as he made her feel. Her eyes fluttered closed as his fingers caressed the imperfections, made them his, as carefully and lovingly as if she were made of glass, and she felt her lips part in a silent cry of fear and euphoria.

It was around that point that he had pulled her into his lap, so that she straddled him. It was also when Liesel felt a cold pang of fear brush down her spine. It was going too fast, speeding ahead to an unknown outcome. Yet she pushed forward, plunged deeper into the void.

Everything had frozen, just for a minute, as he rested his forehead against hers and tried to steady his breathing. His eyes met hers and held them, as he reached up and brushed the hair from her face, silently asking her the question she had no idea how to answer. This was the crossroad. This determined what came next.

And when she had looked into the deep, lustful blue of his eyes, she had seen fear. He was as afraid as she was, and for some reason, she found she loved him so much more for that. He was still that hopeful boy with the smug grin that ran races in the street. The boy next door. Her Rudy.

He didn't look to her for permission, he looked to her for reassurance.

***October 7th, 1947***

**Four years.**

**Only he could make her forget.**

She had held him close, kissed his forehead, and nodded, almost imperceptibly, but it was enough for Rudy.

Then there was pain. A powerful ache between her legs seemed to split her in half, rippling through her bones as he moved into her, and she winced, digging her nails into his shoulders. Rudy had groaned, gripping her waist. There was a pause, in which they had gathered themselves a little bit. Then it continued.

It was quite odd when she thought about it. The gripping soreness was a different kind of pain, nothing like she had ever known. It was bittersweet, and oddly gratifying, in a perverse, satisfactory way. It rolled through her system in waves, biting impertinently at her insides.

Beautiful, beautiful pain it was.

Rudy's name was forever printed on her lips as it was released in small gasps against his skin. He kept her close, one arm wrapped round her waist, his other hand stroking her hair as she buried her face in his shoulder, trying to stifle the yelps of pain. His lips stayed pressed tenderly to her neck as he rocked into her. He did not let a sound break from behind his teeth.

Liesel had not dared to look at what was going on below her. Truthfully, it had frightened her, more than any other experiences she had collected that night. It was a terrifying concept, how their bodies were seemingly joined. Of course, she knew the biological process; God knows, she had sat through enough damn health classes in her final year at school. But she kept her eyes clenched shut, bearing against the aching waves that seemed to be growing in size and frequency, hoping in equal measure that it would be over, yet not wanting it to end.

She could remember it suddenly picking up in speed. It hurt, growing steadily into a tsunami, a storm that she had to ride out. She could remember the tears stinging her eyes as the storm began to ravage her, sending her into stiff, savage spasms. Rudy seemed to be experiencing a similar afflictions as his movements picked up pace. Their panting mingled together in the hot, heavy air.

Her head tipped back as his lips ran across her collarbone. Her arms wrapped tightly around his neck and he laid small kisses across her shoulder. In a stab of sharp impatience and desire, she turned her head and caught his lips against her own, and she could taste a deep moan rising longingly from his throat.

There was an odd, swelling sensation in the tight knot of her stomach, rising up in her lungs like a volcano of delicious, burning glory until, finally, it was released from her lips in a hoarse cry of pain. Rudy's arms tightened around her, gripping her skin as he groaned again into her shoulder, a long, drawn out sound that burnt with desire, coupled with a gentle bite on her neck, then subsided.

Then there had been silence. Silence and the calming of breath. They had clung to each other, eyes closed, as they tried to settle their thudding heartbeats. Her fingers reached up to grasp his face in trembling hands and she leaned forward and kissed his lips, soft and true and exhausted, as his hands gently knotted in her tangled hair and held her there.

She rolled backward, pulling him with her, so that his head rested on her chest. She could feel his short exhales across her skin as she stroked his lemon hair.

'Hey saumensch,' he said.

Liesel smiled. 'Hey saukerl.'

She could remember being dragged down into the duvet with him as he pulled her against him, wrapping his arms around her, and laid kisses across her lips. It was hard to tell what came next. Reality and fantasy began to distort in a spectrum of monochrome as she drifted into a troubled, dream-filled sleep, listening to the warm sound of Rudy's pulse and his slow breathing in her hair.

She dreamt of several things. A snowman in the basement; her Papa's gentle voice, squeezed out between two accordion lungs; and most prominently, the thought of Rudy Steiner naked, like she had at the confused and disturbed age of thirteen. He glowed in the dark, like he had so many years ago.

It was with these troublesome, yet oddly contented images, that the Book Thief fell into another morning.

Four years.

***October 8th, 1947***

**Four years and a day.**

**The morning after.**

Liesel clutched the duvet to her rapidly pounding heart as the memories flooded her mind, the images tumbling over each other in a wave of panic. Her thoughts were cracked and in a state of disorder at the hands of their golden, alcoholic creator, yet vividly clear, blazing under her eyelids.

'Shit...' she murmured. 'Shit.'

She looked down at Rudy, sleeping soundly, still buried in heavy layers of slumber. She was torn between the whorish longing to wake him so that he could wrap her up with some kind of reassurance - probably the more awkward decision - or the cowardly desire to retreat back to 18 Grande Strasse like the stupid slut she was.

The latter option seemed the better, slightly more honorable, choice, yet it didn't stop her proceeding with the first.

'Rudy?' she said pleadingly. 'Rudy, wake up.'

One perfect German eye cracked open in confusion as Rudy gazed around the room for the source of the familiar sound. His sleepy gaze fell on Liesel's curled up form beside him, and he frowned, as if trying to piece together a puzzle in his subconscious state - a fairly impossible feat.

'Rudy,' she said, a little louder.

Lucidity bloomed in his blue eyes as he looked at Liesel a second time, this time a look of recognition on his face. She waited patiently for it to dawn on him. His eyes widened and he sat up in shock.

'Oh shit.'

There you go.

'Rudy,' she said. He looked around at her with an expression of pleading denial, and she found she had literally nothing to say. They looked at each other in mutual speechlessness, the Book Thief and Jesse Owens undone.

'We-' he gulped, then began again. 'We did it, didn't we?'

Liesel let out a long puff of air. 'We did.'

'Oh.'

They fell into another silence, suffocated by the colossal event that over shadowed them. Humans, I suppose.

'Did it- did it hurt?' he asked across the silence, his voice enveloped by it.

'Yes,' she admitted. 'Quite a lot.'

'Oh God, Liesel, I'm sorry.' His arm reached across to hug her and then snatched back, a look of panic in his eyes, as if he would hurt her by his touch alone. There was a moment where she thought: where common sense and love were dragged battling into the spotlight as she weighed them up. Of course, the latter won.

Her fingers reached out and brushed the lemon hair from his forehead. When he didn't shrink from her, she slid across the mile wide stretch of mattress between them so that she was curled up beside him. The was a split second hesitation, then Rudy's tentative arms wrapped around her, pulling her into his body. It felt as if a barrier had broken, as if the restraint he had clearly tried to set in place had crumbled as she buried into his embrace.

'I'm sorry,' he mumbled again.

'Shut up, saukerl. It wasn't your fault,' she cuffed him lightly, smiling.

'What do you mean?'

'I was acting like an idiot,' she sighed, 'I should have gone home.'

He looked at her, his expression soft. 'I'm glad you didn't.'

'I know,' she smiled sadly. 'I'm glad I didn't.'

His hand reached across her face and pulled her lips to his, and she melted into his arms, rolling back with him so that he was on top of her. Instinct - stupid, stupid instinct - urged her to pull him back into the bed and let him take her again. But Liesel knew that her instincts had gone to shit as soon as she had asked to stay. It would be a long, long time before she would rely on them again.

'Besides, you did what I asked,' she shrugged, pulling away.

'Which was?' he prompted her.

She looked up, her rusty eyes painted with ice blue. 'You made me forget.'

He leaned forward again and caught her mouth in another kiss. 'You made me forget too,' he said softly against her lips. She smiled, and could taste his smile as well.

He broke off and grinned. 'So how much of that would you say was fuelled by the whiskey?'

'Ninety eight percent,' she said, 'Give or take.'

'And the other two percent?'

'Now there's a good question,' she said thoughtfully, 'Hormones? Over-sentimentality? Something along those lines.'

'Sounds about right.'

A laugh bubbled up in their throats, glorious and tired, and they settled back into the pillows. Liesel's head nestled into his throat, breathing in the homely scent of peace and dried sweat.

'Did you know what you were doing?' she asked in curiosity.

'Nope. You?'

'Why the hell would _I_ know anything about this?'

'Good point.'

There was a moment of contemplation, as Liesel thought about the events beforehand - the texture of his lips against her skin, the taste of the moan rising in his lungs - and tried not to let the passionate jumbled mess of panic and lust rise in her throat.

'Did you enjoy it?' he asked tentatively.

'I don't know,' she said. 'Sort of. It was strange but...nice. Do you know what I mean?

'Yeah,' he said. 'It was weird, but I liked it.'

'I guess it's the type of thing that you get better at with time,' she shrugged.

'So do you want to try it again?'

'Fuck no.'

He laughed. 'So can I go back to sleep?'

'Go ahead.'

He reached down and dragged the duvet over them, hugging her close to him. Warm, black oblivion began to settle over them once again like a layer of dust. They drifted off a second time, buried in that satisfactory sense of victory that came with getting through that day.

***October 8th, 1947***

**Four years and a day.**

**They had escaped.**

**They were victorious.**

* * *

**A/N: Holy crap, I hadn't expected it to be this long. This is the longest chapter I've ever written. Wow.**

**Anyway, like I said, this is my first smut piece, and I really hope it was okay, because I found it very difficult to write. I still feel like it isn't the best that it could be, but in the long run, I'm glad I wrote it. **

**I hope you enjoy it, and please leave a review.**

**(For future reference, I wrote a lot of this while listening to Salty Seas by Dévics. It's a beautiful song, just sayin')**


	10. Yellow

**A/N: Hey guys. So I have had this idea for a while now, and I really want to try it out. It is set before the events of Victory (whaaAAAAT?!) so they haven't kissed yet. It's basically the tension building up between the two of them - I know, they're like thirteen, but there's bound to be something there, right?**

**Anyway, enjoy.**

* * *

'Rudy, where are we actually going?'

'I told you. You'll see.'

'But I want to know!'

'I _told_ you. You'll see.'

'Rudy, that's not very encouraging.'

'Thanks. I'm flattered.'

On a grassy bank, cut in two by the rippling silver ribbon of the Amper River looping across the landscape, Liesel and Rudy wandered leisurely through what was probably once a forest, their footsteps weaving between the bones of trees. Drops of golden green sunlight dripped from the tips of leaves to their faces, running down their skin like warm, pretty rain. Her fingers brushed across the spines of trees like the books in the Bürgermeister's library.

It was an ridiculously warm Autumn day, one of the stray splashes of Summer that, on very rare occasions, leak into Winter. Never ones to miss an opportunity, Liesel and Rudy had plunged into it, thieving fingers bared eagerly. Or at least, Liesel had. Rudy apparently had other plans.

So now they were here, on a seemingly endless trek along the shimmering, tin foil river. Liesel had long since given up the pretence of indifference, and instead started repeatedly questioning Rudy on where they were actually headed. He, of course, remained aggravatingly unmovable.

She looked over at Rudy, shielding herself from the light that stained her eyes. 'Have we ever been there before?'

'Not that I know of,' he said slowly.

Liesel let out a sound of exasperation. 'What's that even supposed to mean? We've either been there or we haven't.'

Rudy swung round a tree to face her, smiling brightly. 'Don't you just _love_ the mystery of it all?'

'I'm not even going to dignify that with a response,' she said coldly to his smirk.

'Of course you're not,' he said with mock disdain, turning away and continuing to walk.

There was a short pause. 'You have no clue where we're going, do you?'

'Of course I know where we're going,' he answered, a touch defensively. 'What kind of dipshit do you think I am?'

'Do you really want me to answer that?'

'Not particularly.'

He caught her eye and grinned, and she looked away, her thoughts clouded with yellow. This seemed to be occurring more and more lately: yellow, yellow, yellow. The colour of her days with him. The taste of sun-tainted book thefts. The lemon shade of his hair. It was everywhere.

And for some reason, it was all she could think about.

Not that this was wholly surprising, to any onlookers. Adolescence had blown in with a gust of wind - dragging with it a wild variety of emotions and mood swings - and had began to envelope the two of them in a rather irritating manner. Liesel had become increasingly aware of the other girls at school suddenly gaining an interest in boys, and rouge, and breasts. At first, she couldn't possibly comprehend what was to be so fussed about. But she was still small, her chest still flat, and she had not bled. And she became horribly aware of that fact as the children around her began to eagerly and forcefully barge into some twisted form of adulthood.

It wasn't just her suddenly awkwardly aware of her own body and it's supposed deficiencies. Rudy was finding himself increasingly disturbed by the conversations he found himself roped into by his fellow football players. Mostly, it was females and their, shall we say, bodily functions. It was with an odd mix of confusion, adoration and something that cut a little deeper - very close to the knot of his stomach where the moths would begin to stir in Liesel's presence - that he began to think about his best friend in ways he barely thought possible, ways that would drag sleep from his eyes and leave him laid helplessly awake for the rest of the night.

And so it was that the next generation marched to the next stage of their lives, a jumbled, supposedly sophisticated mess of emotions, extroverts and general idiocy, dragging a bound and blindfolded Liesel and Rudy in its wake struggling for their freedom. Their lips were sewn together, their teeth snapped shut by this new awareness of their standing in life. Suddenly, their words gained new, terrifying meanings, and they had to watch what left their lips, how they would come out. Nevertheless, they continued, as far as they could, being children.

But it didn't quite stop the ache in his chest as he watched her trace the words on a page with her finger. Nor did it stop her eyes being stung with yellow as he smiled at some sarcastic remark she had made. Though they couldn't quite place why.

***One Small Fact***

**Despite all they said,**

**Jesse Owens and the Book Thief were becoming teenagers.**

**They were growing up.**

Understanderbly unsatisfied with the answers she had been fed, Liesel changed tack. 'Are we nearly there yet?'

'Uh...maybe?'

'Rudy, you said you knew where you were going.'

'I do!' he replied, affronted. Then after some thought, 'Just give me five minutes.'

A sharp sigh of annoyance ripped from her lungs. 'Come with me, he said. It'll be _fun_, he said...'

'And aren't you just having the time of your life?'

'Just give me five minutes,' she snapped back.

Rudy was silent beside her, but she knew enough about him to work out that he was suppressing a grin - because nothing seemed to give Rudy Steiner more joy than to get on her nerves. That idiot.

'Seriously, you need to have a little more faith,' Rudy pointed out.

'Why don't I show you a little faith when you give me reason to,' she replied levelly.

'Touché.'

Despite herself, Liesel felt a smile bite the corners of her lips and she irritably shoved it down. Screw that smug bastard, she wasn't giving him the satisfaction. Her eyes strayed over to him and found with a mixture of confusion and something else that he was staring right back at her. There was a moment of not quite knowing whether to look away or continue to stare in some sort of defiance, though why she was feeling so defiant at this turn of events was beyond her. Either it was Rudy's aggravating demeanor today, or it was the annoyance at being caught off guard by his gaze. Yellow. Goddamn yellow everywhere.

Not wishing to back down, she decided to proceed with the latter. For the next few minutes, the two engaged in what seemed to be a staring contest with no winner and no particular intention - though it did cause both of them to walk into several trees.

***Why She Stared***

**Yellow**

***Why He Stared***

**Pink**

Why pink?

It was the colour of the Book Thief's lips.

That dusty, faded shade of pink that curved into a grin filled his thoughts and made his poor heart pound at the same speed as his racing feet. As he looked at her, his wonderful best friend, all he could see was the tender flesh of her lips, and how much he would love to taste them against his own, run his fingers through her hair, hold her face in both hands as he kissed her... Shit. Stop.

He dragged his eyes away and tried to focus his thoughts on the silently observing river through the trees and soothe the ache in his chest where his heartbeat had suddenly skyrocketed.

They continued on in relative silence, carefully and precisely looking anywhere but each other's faces, where there resided a guaranteed increase in temperature and just general awkwardness. Liesel had forgotten her interrogation of Rudy and had settled with just accepting this apparent adventure. It was a beautiful day, so thankfully, there was a lot of pretence for them not looking at each other. She could easily be avoiding him and pass it off as taking in the scenery.

Suddenly, Rudy halted where he stood, causing Liesel to nearly trip over in her haste to look round.

'Thanks for the warning, arschloch,' she called, as he peered through the trees.

'We're here,' he said, grinning at her.

Liesel looked around in confusion. 'What do you mean? It's just trees.'

'Don't be ridiculous,' he said, shaking his head. He reached out and grabbed her hand, pulling her closer, and pointed through the forest bones. 'Look, it's right there.'

Trying to ignore his proximity, she looked more closely through the green and brown teeth of the woods, and saw what seemed to be a clearing. Before she could distinguish any defining features, he dragged her eagerly towards what turned out to be a huge, beautiful tree, twisting upward into the sky and blocking out the sun.

Both simultaneously looked up in awe at the curling branches reaching across from horizon to horizon, weaving through the blue and creating green cracked glass shadows across the ground. Their eyes fell to the long, thick rope hanging from one of the lower branches (still a good six metres up) and they felt the longing bite their fingers.

It was around that point that they realised that Rudy was still gripping her hand, and they hurriedly took a step away from each other, him scratching the back of his head sheepishly. There was a sharp moment of not talking sliding across their foreheads, and then Rudy bounded towards the rope and leapt onto it, swinging back and forth.

Liesel watched in wonder as he flew through the air on the rope. 'Come on, you shitdick, it's fun!' he yelled to the sky.

A grin spread across her face and she found herself positively running towards the rope, and her wonderful, wonderful yellow best friend- nope, just the rope, just the rope. Rudy slid down it to the ground, looking smug.

'So is this reason enough to put a little faith in me?' he asked smirking.

'How did you find this place?' she cried smiling, and his eyes were painted with pink.

'Technically, I didn't. Kurt told me about it,' he shrugged.

It was one of those many occasions where Rudy Steiner would strategically leave out approximately eighty percent of the original story. Yes, Kurt had informed him of the place. Yes, he told his younger brother how to get there. But only when asked. The truth was, he wanted to please his Book Thief, maybe get a kiss in return. In all fairness to the romantic little bastard, he had fulfilled a lot of what he set out to do.

However, the latter of his aspirations was a little harder to achieve.

'So you didn't know where you were going?' Her eyebrows were caught halfway between her forehead and her eyes.

'I don't recall ever saying that.'

'I was right, wasn't I?'

'I suppose.'

'Thought so.'

Her hands reached up and gripped the rope. She looked back to Rudy and found him gazing at her with an odd expression on his face: what seemed like tenderness and something else, something she couldn't quite place. Then he seemed to snap out of it and grinned.

'Do you know what you're doing?' he said.

'Sure, how hard can it be?' She waved him off and jumped, letting the rope drag her a few feeble feet and back again. She sighed an slid down. 'I'm guessing that's not how you do it.'

'Nope,' he shook his head disapprovingly. 'Let me show you.'

Liesel stepped back and let Rudy grab hold of the rope. He pulled it back towards the trunk of the tree. There was a pause where he threw a reassuring glance at her, then he jumped, flying through the air as he gripped the rope in both hands. In truth, she didn't watch the swinging. She watched him, the sunlight spilling across his lemon hair in short bursts as he glided through the shadows.

Yellow. Yellow, yellow and more yellow. It burned beneath her eyelashes, blossoming up through the rust like a sunflower in mud. She looked away, let the flower wither and die and be swallowed by the cold hard metal. She couldn't afford to let it grow. She just couldn't.

'Oi saumensch, it's your turn,' she heard him call and she ran across to the him. 'Go stand by the tree,' he ordered, and she obeyed, standing by the wide trunk. Rudy pulled the rope over to her.

'Take it,' he said.

Her fingers grasped the rope just below his. He let go, and she stumbled a little, dragged by the uncomfortable angle against the overhanging branch. His hands flew out and caught her around her waist, and they froze. The pressure from his fingers against her ribs made the blood in her veins grind painstakingly down to a halt as she took in this surprising and unsettling turn of events.

Rudy had touched her several times throughout their lives, and she herself had administered several touches to him, mostly in the form of friendly - and some not so friendly - punches. They were not strangers to each other, far from it. He was her best friend, and she his. But suddenly, the sense that they were doing something wrong bit at their skin and stuck to their teeth. And Liesel could do nothing but internally curse her stupid, stupid body for being so damn susceptable to random emotions flying out of nowhere and slapping her in the face whenever Rudy happened to touch her.

Rudy's grip on her slid away and he took a step back, with the look of someone having a fierce battle with themselves.

***Did He Want To Let Go Of Her?***

**Take an educated guess.**

His hands burned, hanging limply by his side for lack of any better option (he couldn't exactly punch a tree in frustration - that would raise suspicion - and he couldnt walk forward, take her in his arms and kiss her - that would most likely raise some suspicion too). He looked up at her and forced a struggling and reluctant grin to rise to his face.

'You're pretty shit at this, aren't you?'

He could see the desperate relief flood her face at the distraction, before being replaced by gloriously happy indignation.

'Well you're pretty shit at teaching me,' she retorted. 'Now shut up and tell me how to do it properly.'

Rudy shrugged in defeat and grabbed the rope again, dragging it back towards the tree trunk. Liesel stood and watched as he leant back against the rope.

He looked at her expectantly. 'Well? Are you coming?'

'Oh yeah.'

She ran over to where he stood and took hold of the rope a second time. This time Rudy had moved well back, repeating feeble excuses in his head that she was a better learner without him stood there. Why he was trying to back himself out of it is beyond me, because there wasn't really anything to back out of, let alone worry about. But paranoia does strange things to humans, especially youths. It can be quite entertaining.

Liesel mimicked him, leaning back into the tree trunk, the rope tightly woven between her fingers. She looked over at Rudy for reassurance, who nodded encouragingly. A long dose of oxygen swelled up in her lungs, and she jumped.

And then she was flying, swooping through the golden green shadows cast by the bones of trees like a bird. The ground swung bizarrely beneath her feet and the wind ran its fingers through her tangled hair. The sunlight painted her skin as she grinned, and let out a long, ecstatic cry. She could feel the air brush past her face and she let her head tip back in elation as the cracked glass blue of the sky rippled across her eyes. The sky tasted of leaves. It was glorious.

Rudy watched her, a constant, aching smile threatening to appear with every turn of her head and every smile that lit up her dazed metallic eyes. Her face took on a dreamlike quality, as if she couldn't quite believe the reality of her current situation but was determinedly not questioning it for fear of it ending. He watched her, and hoped to God that she would always be this happy, this perfect. He looked at her, her face flushed, wrapped around the rope, and he wondered fleetingly what she would look like if she were wrapped around _him, _her fingers winding into his hair, the pink of her lips caught between his own. Then he pinched himself hard and tried to forget the sweet, faded shade of pink that he loved so very much, and the girl he loved even more.

Seems to me a fairly impossible feat when the girl was stood in front of him, still gripping the rope, her almost-German hair falling over her dizzy smile, trying to catch her breath. But what do I know? It's not like I've ever had to struggle with adolescence. In a world with so much suffering to be witnessed, I suppose that's one small upside to this job.

'It's your turn, dummkopf.' Rudy was dragged out of his reverie to see Liesel still gripping the rope, still grinning that whimsical grin as if not quite out of the dream she had been caught up in, and he felt his insides clench with raw, tumbling adoration.

_Kiss her. Just kiss her._

His body was prepared to act at a moment's notice from his brain. His feet twitched unconsciously with a longing to walk up to her and sweep her off her feet like the swing or something equally manly, but in retrospect, he probably wasn't big enough to pull off that kind of action anyway. His heart urged him, positively begged him, wrapped its arteries around his ankles until he agreed to its terms and conditions, to just walk over there and steal her lips, like she had stolen him.

_Just kiss her._

But something kept him rooted to the spot, something heavy and constricting tying him down like barbed wire. Was it fear? Most likely. But what of? Now that's a good question.

***Some Possible Reasons to Fear for Rudy Steiner***

**+ Embarrassment: quite likely**

**+ Insecurity: again, quite likely**

**+ Rejection: most certainly**

**+ Fear of losing her: inevitably**

He was bound by fear. It dripped from his skin and blinded him. He was afraid, because he had everything to lose, and when someone has everything to lose, they tend not to try and risk it. Ironically enough, it was only a few months until he threw everything on the table so readily, so boldly, so terrified, and finally - finally - received his due.

'Well, if you don't want a turn, I guess I'll just have another go,' he heard her eager voice somewhere far away and her yell of exhilaration as she began to fly a second time.

God, she was so wonderful. His saumensch. His Book Thief.

She slid down once again, her feet hitting the ground, and Rudy was once more brought back to his surroundings.

'Christ, Liesel, why don't I just cut the crap and leave you and the rope to it?' Rudy called and heard her laugh sounding against the trees.

'Very funny,' came her sarcastic reply. 'Do you want a turn or not?'

'Yes, ma'am,' he said, and if Liesel were only a few metres closer, he would have earned himself a cuff around the head.

Liesel stepped back from the rope and Rudy, nearly tripping over a highly conspicuously positioned root sticking out the ground, mounted it gleefully, kicking off and swinging back and forth, trying forcefully to forget the way his heart was increasing in speed with each minute that he was around her.

The hours slipped by in a giddy whirl of crying out in ecstasy as their world became sky, arguing over who got to have a go next, and using the time spent waiting to silently and tenderly observe the other as they flew back and forth.

Liesel watched Rudy as he swung through the air, his grip tight on the rope, his face split into a wide grin, and tried not to smile. There was love deep down, stirring in her somewhere in the dusty region of her heart that she never had the interest to explore. The question was how she loved him. He was her best friend. Generally, she could pinpoint the line between platonic and something else entirely, but some days, days such as these, the line grew distorted and the term friendship just didn't seem to fit the description any more. Some days she wanted to slap him, some days she wanted to build castles out of mud with him, and some days she just run at him, and do what, she wasn't quite sure, but she knew that whatever it was, it could barely be confined to the boundaries of 'friendship'.

Yellow tinged her eyes, as it had so many times today, and she wondered why. It was a confusing and unknown emotion that pinched her ribs and caught in her lungs, an she didn't understand what its purpose was. So, like so many other things, she oppressed it, buried it deep down below her chest and kept it captive there, until she would work out what to do with it.

***An Observation***

**This resolve lasted a sum of about two months.**

**In the arms of the icy river, not far from where they were now,**

**She finally gave in.**

Of course, when adolescence hits and awkwardness becomes the essence of the human soul, life sometimes enjoys screwing them around with the desperately vulnerable creatures that stumble around the Earth in a confused mess of emotion, rebellion and longing.

So was it necessarily very surprising when the events that followed occurred? Absolutely not.

It was a simple misunderstanding of sorts, albeit a devastatingly ill timed one. What was painfully ironic about the situation was it could have easily been avoided by anyone else in the world. But of course, it was Liesel and Rudy. And on a day when pink and yellow ruled their eyes and stole their hearts, something like this was bound to happen.

So how was it that Jesse Owens found himself laid on top of the unsuspecting Book Thief, a mere few centimetres of panicked breath all that separated their lips? How indeed.

'Rudy, stop hogging it. It's my go,' Liesel said indignantly as Rudy kicked off again.

'You said that before,' he called as he swung to astounding heights. 'It's always your go.'

'Well it's not exactly _your_ go anymore,' she pointed out irritably.

'You know, it's so hard to care when you're having this much fun,' he called cheerfully as his voice swooped across the trees.

In retrospect, it was hard to understand the reasoning behind her actions as she wasn't sure what she wanted as an outcome. As his altitude began to deplete, Liesel took her chance. Fool.

Misjudging his speed, she caught the rope as he swung past, and it threw her to the side like a broken toy, dragging a fairly surprised Rudy with her. She felt the leaf bones shatter under her, the roots bite her spinal chord like rock candy. There was tumbling and rolling and yelps of pain and cracked glass eyes until they ground to a stop at the foot of the tree.

When Liesel finally dared to open her eyes again, she was both shocked and disturbed to find Rudy barely even an inch from her face. His icy blue eyes were wide and frozen in acute, devastating understanding, and she could see herself reflected in them, only her and the horriffingly close pink of her lips. They stared at each other, stuck at a stalemate, her buried under him and terrified to move. The moment she moved would be the moment they would be forced at gunpoint to acknowkedge their proximity, the marvellous, terrible truth that was their current situation.

She could taste his slow, measured breaths on her face, across her lips, and she could feel her heart failing, the needle sharp longing stab her through the lungs, dragging the oxygen from her teeth like barbed wire. He was so close. He was so very, wonderfully, horribly close. He tasted of yellow. Such a beautiful colour.

Rudy was centimetres from her face, his lips an inhale of air away from hers, close enough to kiss or bite. His mind had shut down on itself, silencing any articulate thoughts that he may have had. Only pink, only goddamn pink and the short, fluttering sound of her panicked breathing. He wanted to lean down and steal the panic from her mouth, just feel her lips against his, taste the pink on the edge of his tongue, graze his teeth across it. Just a few more millimetres and he could have claimed her lips as his own, like he had dreamed of doing since he first saw her, and yet it felt like miles. How could such a short distance be so unbearably far?

_Kiss her. Just kiss her._

Oh how he wanted to kiss her. Just forget the Führer and the bombs and the Victor Chemmels. He wanted a victory.

'Rudy?' Liesel said, testing the air on her tongue as if it were poisenous.

'Yeah?'

He knew the grin that was forced to her face wasn't real, he could tell by the way her lips trembled as they curved shakily into a smile, but it was enough of a cue to realise that she just wanted to laugh the whole thing off and forget it as quickly and discreetly as if it were a dead body. Of course she wanted to forget.

'Rudy, get the hell off me, I can't breathe,' her face was a little too bright for conviction, but he scrambled to his feet regardless.

'It's your own damn fault saumensch,' he threw at her, trying to keep the disappointment from stinging his words.

Liesel tried to sit up, her lips in the shape of a retort, but it tore from her throat in a wince of pain and she fell back into the ground. Literally no thought crossed Rudy's mind as he practically sprinted to her side. Her fingers had crept up over her shoulder to her back as she traced her shoulder blades for mines. Another wince caught in her throat and he knew her fingers had stepped on a mine.

'What's wrong?' he asked.

'I dunno, must have scraped my back when we fell,' she said thoughtfully. Their eyes fell upon the root that jutted up from the ground like a broken bone a few feet from them. 'Shit,' she muttered.

'Does it hurt?' he said.

'No Rudy. It feels like a freakin pillow punched me,' she snapped, and another wince was caught between her gritted teeth.

It took a lot of restraint to stop himself from wrapping his arms around her and cradling her until the pain stopped. But he didn't. Because he had everything to lose.

'Can you get up?'

'Probably,' she shrugged. She placed her hands either side of herself and pushed, strain pulsing through her limbs, before she collapsed down again. 'Just give me a minute,' she gasped, grimacing in discomfort.

'Let me see.' He heard the words leave his lips and he wondered what the hell was going through his head. Liesel looked at him for a moment, her metallic eyes searching, then what looked like defeat blossomed across her features and she began to tug at the buttons of her shirt.

Rudy kept his gaze averted as she slid her shirt from her shoulders, and the back of her neck, then her shoulders blades, then her spinal column were slowly revealed. He knelt behind her, and studied the long, angry read scratch that stretched across from her shoulders to the folds of her shirt. There was a smudge of blood towards the back of her neck and he brushed it with his fingers. The longing to lean forward and press his lips against it, against her neck, her shoulder, her lips, burned in his throat, yet he kept his distance. He reached up and dragged the almost-German hair hanging down across her back over her shoulder, and he felt her tense under his touch. A pang of regret pinched at his palms as she flinched away from him a little.

Liesel felt her eyes grow hazy, tinging at the edges of her peripheral vision with yellow, as she felt his breath drip across her neck. Her skin bured with it as he ran his fingertips across the long, stinging scratch, though the pain had evaporated minutes ago, as if it had never been there. It was that lemon shade of yellow that made her want to turn, take his face in both hands and kiss him for all his golden worth.

But she couldn't. She couldn't afford the high price. No more yellow. She couldn't afford it.

She felt the warmth of his hands withdraw and she let out a breath she didn't know she had been holding in. Though the lack of his touch was suddenly overwhelming, she could still feel his shallow, measured breathing against her shoulder. They stayed there, two adolescents frozen with an indistinguishable mix of fear and desire. It suddenly struck Liesel that she was, in her present state, only partly clothed. she hurriedly dragged her shirt back over her shoulders, and stumbled to her feet, backing away and keeping her gaze fixedly away from him.

Rudy got slowly to his feet, taking in the confused, sharp metallic glint of her rusty eyes, and knew he had never known anyone more wonderful.

The words were old in his throat but always waiting hopefully behind his teeth for release. They were battered and worn, chipped away by the continual refusals, but never any less optimist. They ached in his lungs, positively dripped from his mouth. But what could they bring except another rejection? They were cursed words, he was sure, yet it didn't stop them slipping from him and falling to the ground like snow.

'So,' he said. 'How about a kiss saumensch?'

Rudy could have sworn he saw a flicker of a smile at the corners of her lips, but whatever was there was replaced rapidly by a soft, cold expression. 'In your dreams Steiner.'

He grinned. He knew the answer before it came, and in retrospect, he had probably thought that knowing the outcome before it came would soften the blow. Wrong. He still felt the familiar stab of hurt puncture his heart. But he grinned regardless, laughed it off as if it were nothing, like he had taught himself to do whenever she tossed his words to the ever growing pile of his rotting hopes. He grinned, because what else could he do? He loved her too much to give her anything less. He grinned, because it was enough for her.

Liesel smiled softly, and he felt his heart ache. 'Come on saukerl, let's go home.'

He nodded. 'Yeah, I think we've had enough damage for one day.'

'It's funny how one of us always seems to end up injured on our outings,' she commented dryly.

'Eh, you can't have a good adventure without breaking a few bones.'

'-Or necks.'

They laughed, and began to wander leisurely back towards the Amper River, leaving behind the pink and the yellow in favour of the far calmer, slightly less temperamental ice blue and rust brown. Beautiful, sweet colours they were, no adulthood corrupting them, just the raw, childish core that resided in both of them.

As for Rudy, as they walked back through the bones of trees, through the bones of their childhoods, he wondered if he'd ever receive his victory.

* * *

**A/N: Hey guys. Let's play: spot the Doctor Who reference! Free imaginary cookies for anyone who does.**

**I'm so sorry that this took so long, it wasn't my intention, but this was harder to write than I expected. I hope you enjoyed it, and please leave a review to tell me what you think.**


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